The Gateway Trip

PART NINE: THE AGE OF GOLD

While human beings were beginning to thread their way across the immensity of the galaxy, the world they had left behind was beginning to change. It took a long time, but at last the Heechee wonders the Gateway prospectors had brought home were beginning to make a real change for the better in the condition of the peoples of the Earth—even the poorest ones.

One key discovery unlocked all the rest. That was learning how to read the Heechee language. The hardest part of that was finding any Heechee language to read, because the Heechee did not seem to have been familiar with things like pencils, paper, or printing. It was a sure-thing bet in the opinion of everybody who ever gave it a thought that the Heechee must have had some way of recording things, but where was it?

When the answer turned up it was obvious enough: the long-mysterious “prayer fans” were actually Heechee “books.” That is, it was obvious after the fact—though the tricky bit was that the things couldn’t be read without some high-tech aid.

Once the records were identified as records, the rest was up to linguists. It wasn’t all that hard. It certainly was no harder, say, than the long-ago decipherment of “Linear B,” and it was made easier by the fact that places were discovered, on “Heechee Heaven” and elsewhere, where parallel texts could be found in both languages.

When the prayer fans were interpreted, some of the most intractable Heechee mysteries became crystal clear. Not the least of them was how to reproduce the Heechee faster-than-light drive. Then colonization could really begin. The great ship that had been called “Heechee Heaven” was the first to be used for that purpose, because it was already there. It ferried thousands of poverty-stricken emigrants at a time to new homes on places like Peggy’s Planet, and that was only the beginning. Within five years that ship was joined by others, now human made—just as fast; even bigger.

And on the home planet itself . . .

On the home planet itself, it was the CHON-food factories that made the first big difference.

Simply put, what they did was end human starvation forever. The Heechee’s own CHON-food factories orbited in cometary space—that was the reason for the long-baffling Heechee fascination with Oort clouds, now answered at last. The human-made copies of these factories could be sited anywhere—that is, anywhere there was a supply of the basic four elements. The only other raw material they needed was enough of a salting of impurities to fill out the dietary needs.

So before long the CHON-food factories sat on the shores of the Great Lakes in North America and Lake Victoria in Africa and everywhere else where water and the four elements were present and people wanted to eat. They were along the beaches of every sea. No one starved anymore.

No one died of hunger before his time—and before long it was almost true that no one died at all. This was for two reasons. The first of them had to do with surgery, and, peculiarly, with the CHON-food factories, as well.

For a long time human beings had known how to substitute transplants for any worn-out organ. Now the replacement parts no longer had to be butchered out of cadavers. The same system that made CHON-food, considerably refined, could be induced to manufacture tailor-made human organs to implant into people in need. (A whole wicked industry of assassinations for the marketplace collapsed overnight.) Nobody had to die because a heart, lung, kidney, bowel, or bladder wore out. You just turned over your specifications to the people at the spare-parts division of the CHON-food factory, and when they pulled your new organs out of their amniotic soup the surgeons popped them in place.

In fact, all the life sciences flowered. The Heechee food factories made it possible to identify, and then to reproduce or even create, a thousand new biological agents—anti-antigens; antivirals; selective enzymes; cell replacements. Disease simply passed out of fashion. Even such long-endured traumas as tooth decay, childbirth, and the common cold became history. (Why should any woman suffer through parturition when some other breeding machine—say, a cow—could be persuaded to accept the fertilized ovum, nurture it to ripeness, and deliver it healthy and squalling?)

And then there was the second reason. If, in spite of everything, a person did finally die of simple overall decay, he didn’t have to die completely. At least, there was another Heechee invention—it had been first found on the ship called “Heechee Heaven"—that robbed death of some of its sting. The Heechee’s techniques for capturing a dead person’s mind in machine storage produced the “dead men” on Heechee Heaven. Later, on Earth, it produced the enterprise called “HereAfter, Inc.” the worldwide chain of operators that would take your deceased mother or spouse or friend, put his or her memory into computer space, and permit you to converse with him or her whenever you liked—forever. Or as long as someone paid the storage charges for his or her datafile.

At first that certainly wasn’t quite the same as being really alive. But it was a whole lot better than being irrecoverably dead.

Of course, as the technology matured (and it matured very fast), machine storage of human intelligence got easier and a great deal better.

When it got really good it began to raise some unexpected problems. Surprisingly, the problems were theological. The promises of Earthly religions were being fulfilled in a way the religious leaders had never planned, for indeed it seemed now to be true that “life” was only a sort of overture, and that “death” was in fact nothing more than the stepping stone to “eternal bliss in Heaven.”

The dying man who then woke up to find himself no more than a collection of bits in the datafile of the immense computer networks might well wonder why he had clung to life in his organic body so long, for the machine afterlife had everything going for it. He had lost nothing through death. He still could “feel.” The machine-stored ate as much as they liked—neither cost nor season were factors in planning a menu—and if they chose they excreted, too. (It did not matter that the “food” the “dead man” ate was only symbolically represented by bits of data, because so was he. He could not tell the difference.) All the biological functions were possible. He was deprived of none of the pleasures of the flesh. He could even make love with his dearest—provided only that she had stored herself in the same net—or with any number of dearests, real and imaginary, if that was how his tastes went. If he wanted the society of the still-living friends he had left behind, there was nothing to stop him representing himself to them (as a machine-generated hologram) in order to have a conversation, or a friendly game of cards.

There was also travel; and, perhaps most popular of all, there was work. After all, the basic human work is only a kind of data processing. Humans don’t dig the foundations for skyscrapers. Machines do that; all the humans do is run the machines, and that could be done as readily from machine storage as in the flesh.

All those books that the deceased had been meaning to read—the plays, the operas, the ballets, the orchestral performances—now there was time to enjoy them. As much time as he chose. Whenever he chose.

That was heaven indeed. The dead person’s style of life was exactly what he wanted it to be. He didn’t have to worry about what he could “afford” or what was “bad for him.” The only limit was his own desire. If he wished to be cruising in the Aegean or sipping cold rum drinks on a tropical beach, he only had to order it. Then the datastores would summon up any surround he liked, as detailed as any reality could be and just as rewarding. It was almost like living in a perfect video game. The operative word is “perfect,” for the simulations were just as good as the reality; in fact they were better: Tahiti without mosquitoes, French cuisine without gaining weight, the pleasure in the risks of mountain-climbing without the penalty of being killed in an accident. The deceased could ski, swim, feast, indulge in any pleasure . . . and he never had a hangover.

Some people are never happy. There were a few of the formerly dead who weren’t satisfied. Sipping aperitifs at the Cafй de la Paix or rafting down the Colorado River, they would take note of the taste of the Campari and the spray of the water and ask, “But is it real?” Well, what is “real"? If a man whispers loving words to his sweetheart on the long-distance phone, what is it that she “really” hears? It isn’t his own dear voice. That was a mere shaking of the atmosphere. It has been analyzed and graphed and converted into a string of digits; what is reconstituted in the phone at her ear is an entirely different shaking of the air. It is a simulation.

For that matter, what did she hear even when her darling’s lips were only inches away? It was not her ear that “heard” the words. All the ear does is register changes in pressure by their action on the little stirrup and anvil bones. Just as all the eye does is respond to changes in light-sensitive chemicals. It is up to the nerves to report these things to the brain, but they only report coded symbols of the things, not the things themselves, for the nerves cannot carry the sound of a voice or the sight of Mont Blanc; all they transmit is impulses. They are no more real than the digitized voice of a person on a phone.

It is up to the mind that inhabits the brain to assemble these coded impulses into information, or pleasure, or beauty. And a mind that happens to be inhabiting machine storage can do that just as well.

So the pleasure, all the pleasures, were as “real” as pleasure ever is. And if the mere pursuit of pleasure began to pall, after a (subjective) millennium or two, he could work. Some of the greatest music of the period was composed by “ghosts,” and from them came some of the greatest advances in scientific theory. It was really surprising that, nevertheless, so many people still preferred to cling to their organic lives.

All of this led to a rather surprising situation, though it took awhile for anyone to realize it.

When the Gateway explorers started bringing back useful Heechee technology, the world population on Earth wasn’t much more than ten billion. That was only a tiny fraction of all the human beings who had ever lived, of course. The best guess anybody would make about the total census was—oh, well, maybe—let’s say, somewhere around a hundred billion people.

That included everybody. It included you and your neighbor and your cousin’s barber. It included the president of the United States and the pope and the woman who drove your school bus when you were nine; it included all the casualties in the Civil War, the American Revolution, and the Peloponnesian Wars, and their survivors, too; all the Romanovs and Hohenzollerns and Ptolemys, and all the Jukes and Kallikaks, as well; Jesus Christ, Caesar Augustus, and the innkeepers in Bethlehem; the first tribes to cross the land bridge from Siberia to the New World, and also the tribes who stayed behind; “Q” (an arbitrary name assigned to the unknown first man to make use of fire), “X” (the arbitrary name of his father), and the original African Eve. What it included was everybody, living or dead, who was taxonomically human and born before that first year of Gateway.

That came, as we said, to a grand total of 100,000,000,000 people (give or take quite a lot), of whom the great majority were deceased.

Then along came Heechee, or Heechee-inspired, medicine, and things got started. The numbers of the living meat people doubled, and doubled again, and kept on doubling. And they lived longer, too. With modern medicine, they didn’t die before they wanted to. And when they did . . . well, when they did “die” they also still “lived” in mechanical storage, and among that growing electronic population there were no fatalities at all.

So the number of the living continued to increase, while the number of the truly dead remained essentially static, and the result was inevitable. But when the point was reached it still took everyone by surprise; for at last in human history the living outnumbered the dead.

All of that had some interesting consequences. The eighty-year-old woman writing her X-rated memoirs of youthful indiscretions couldn’t drop the names of video stars, gangsters, and bishops anymore—not unless the indiscretions had really happened, anyway—because the video stars, gangsters, and bishops were still around to correct the record.

It was a great plus for the oldest persons in machine storage, though. The names that they dropped from their meat days were well and truly dead, and in no condition to dispute the stories.

It wasn’t bad to be a meat person anymore. Hardly any of them were poor.

Well, they weren’t money poor. Not even on Earth. Nor were they poor in possessions. All their factories with all their clever robots were turning out smart kitchen appliances and fun game machines and talk-anywhere video-telephones, and they were doing it all the time. The cities got really big. Detroit led the way in the old United States, with its three-hundred-story New Renaissance megastructures that covered everything from Wayne State University dormitories to the river; a hundred and seventy million people lived in that crystal ziggurat, and every one of them had personal TVs with three hundred channels and holographic VCRs to fill any gaps left by the networks. Out in the Navajo reservation the tribe (now eighty million strong) erected a more-than-Paolo-Soleri arcology; the lowest forty stories produced frozen diet meals, clothing, and woven rugs for the tourist trade, and all above was filled with extended Navajo families. On the sands of the Kalahari Desert, the Kungs entered a life of plenty and ease. China reached twenty billion that year, each family with its fridge and electric wok. Even in Moscow the shelves of the GUM department store were loaded with clock radios, playing cards, and leisure suits.

There wasn’t any problem producing anything anyone wanted anymore. The energy was there; the raw materials cascaded down from space. Agriculture had become as rationalized as industry at last: robots planted the fields, and robots harvested the crops—genetically tailored crops, enriched with artificial nonpolluting fertilizers and trickle-irrigated, drop by drop, by smart, automatic valves. And the whole, of course, supplemented by the CHON-foodfactories.

And if anyone still felt that Earth was not giving him all he chose to desire—there was always the rest of the galaxy.

That was what the meat people had. What the machine-stored had, of course, was much more. It was everything. Everything they had ever wanted, and everything they could imagine.

Really, there was only one real problem with machine storage after death, and that was relative time.

That couldn’t be helped. Machines move faster than meat. In the interactions between the machine-stored and the meat persons they had left behind, it was a considerable handicap to conversation. The machine-stored found the meat people desperately boring.

It was easy enough for the still-living to talk with their dear departed (because the dear departed hadn’t really departed any farther than the nearest computer terminal), but it was not a lot of fun. It was as bad as trying to make small talk with the Sluggards all over again. While the flesh-and-blood person was struggling to complete a single question, his machine-stored “departed” had time to eat a (machine-stored) meal, play a few rounds of (simulated) golf, and “read” War and Peace.

The fact that the machine-stored moved so much faster brought about some emotional problems for their meat relicts, too. It was particularly disconcerting right after a death. By the time the funeral was over, and the bereft put in a call for the one who had gone before, the one who had gone on had likely gone to take a relaxing, if simulated, cruise through the (also simulated) Norwegian fjords, learned to play the (unreal) violin, and made a hundred new machine-stored friends. The survivors might still have tear stains on their cheeks, but the deceased had almost forgotten his dying.

In fact, when he thought about his life in the flesh his feelings were probably nostalgic, but also quite glad all that was over—like any elderly adult remembering his own blundering, confused, worried childhood.

As one small consequence, machine-storage put the undertakers out of business. The machine-stored did not need a mausoleum to be remembered. Deaths were still marked by ceremonies, but they were more like a wedding reception than a wake; the business went to caterers rather than funeral directors.

Psychologists worried about this for a while. With the dead still (sort of) alive, and even reachable, how would the bereaved manage their grief? When push came to shove, the answer was obvious. Grief wasn’t a problem. There wasn’t much to grieve.

Unfortunately, full stomachs and comfortable lives do not necessarily make human beings good.

Such things probably do help, a little. Nevertheless, the worms of ambition and envy that live in the human mind are not easily sated. As far back as the twentieth century it was observed that the manual laborer who managed to promote himself from cold-water flat to a ranch house with a VCR and a sports car could still feel pangs of envy toward his neighbor with the jacuzzi and the thirty-two-foot cabin cruiser.

The human race didn’t change just because they had acquired Heechee technology. There were still people who wanted what other people had badly enough to try to take it away from them.

So theft did not disappear. Nor did thwarted lovers, or brooding victims, or simple psychopaths who tried to heal their grievances by means of rape, assault, or murder.

An earlier age took care of such people either by caging them in penitentiaries (but the prisons turned out to be mere finishing schools for crime) or turning them over to the executioner (but was murder any less premeditated murder simply because it was the state that was doing it?).

The Age of Gold had better ways. They were less revengeful, and maybe less satisfying to some of the punishment-minded. But they worked. Society was at last fully protected from its renegades. If there were still prisons (and there were), they were manned by computer-driven robot guards who neither slept nor took bribes. Better than prisons, there were planets of exile, where severe offenders could be deported. A criminal dropped on a low-tech planet could probably feed himself and continue to live, but there was no way he could ever build himself an interstellar spaceship to get back to civilization. And for the worst cases, there was HereAfter.

Their minds faithfully reproduced in machine storage, their bodies no longer mattered. They could be disposed of without a qualm. It was capital punishment without its depressingly final aspects. After the sentence was carried out, the criminals weren’t dead. They were still alive—after a fashion, anyway—but they were rendered permanently harmless. From that sort of prison no one ever was paroled, and no one could ever manage to escape.

All it required in order to make all these things happen, given the knowledge of the devices themselves, was energy.

There, too, the Heechee came through. The secret of Heechee power generation came out of study of the core of the Food Factory; and it was cold fusion. It was the same compression of two atoms of hydrogen into one of helium that went on in the core of any star, but not at those same temperatures. The output heat of the reaction came at about 900 Celsius—a nearly ideal temperature for generating electricity—and the process was safe.

So the power was there. It was cheap. And it put ten thousand fuel-burning power plants out of business, so that the carbon-dioxide greenhouse warmup of the Earth came to a halt, and the pollution of Earth’s air stopped overnight. Small vehicles burned hydrogen or ran by flywheel kinetic-energy storage. Everything else took its power off the grids.

Things were really getting to be very nice on Earth, because human technology hadn’t stopped, either.

For not everything in mankind’s flowering of science and technology was a gift from the Heechee. There were computers, for instance.

Human computers were intrinsically better and more advanced than those of the Heechee, because the Heechee had never gone the adding-machine-to-mainframe route. Their methods of dealing with data handling were quite different, and in some ways not as good. Once the human scientists had begun to figure ways of adding Heechee refinements to the already powerful human machines, there was an explosion of knowledge that sparked new technologies in every part of human life.

Quantum-effect devices had long since replaced the clumsy doped silicon microchips, and so computers had become orders of magnitude faster and better. No one had to tap out a program on a keypad any more. He told the computer what he wanted done, and the computer did it. If the instructions were inadequate, the computer asked the right questions to clear it up—it was face-to-face communication, a machine-generated hologram speaking to its flesh-and-blood master.

Heechee food and Heechee power . . . human computers Heechee biochemistry allied to human medicine

The human world at last allowed true humanity to every person who lived on it. And if, even so, any human wanted more, there was a whole galaxy waiting for him that was now within his reach.

There remained the burning and never-forgotten question of the Heechee themselves.

They were elusive. Their works were everywhere, but no one had ever seen a living Heechee, though every last Gateway explorer had wanted to look, and almost every human on Earth dreamed (or had nightmares) of what they would be like when found.

Arguments raged. Answers were scarce. The prevailing theory was that somehow, in some tragic way, the Heechee had died off. Perhaps they had killed themselves in a catastrophic war. Perhaps they had, for reasons not known, emigrated to a distant galaxy.

Perhaps they had suffered a universal plague—or reverted to barbarism—or simply decided that they no longer wanted to bother with traveling through interstellar space.

What everyone agreed on, at last, was that the Heechee were gone. And that was just where everyone was very wrong.

It was not true that the Heechee had died. Certainly not as a race, and, funnily enough, in an astonishing number of cases they hadn’t even died as individuals.

The Heechees were very much alive and well. The reason they were not found was simply that they didn’t want to be. For good and sufficient reasons of their own, they had decided to conceal themselves from any unwelcome attention for a few hundred thousand years.