The Annals of the Heechee, Page 4

  By the time Sneezy got to the schoolhall corner he had already eaten his sandwich, and Harold was waiting. “You’re late, Dopey!” the human boy snapped.

  “They didn’t sound the sighting signal yet,” Sneezy pointed out, “so we aren’t late for anything.”

  “Don’t argue! That’s a baby thing to do. Come on.”

  Harold led the way. He assumed that was his right. He was not only older than Sneezy (at least in personal time, though actually, in terms of the great, ever-expanding clock of the universe, Sneezy had been born several weeks before Harold’s great-great-grandfather), but he out-massed Sneezy three to one, forty kilograms of Harold to not much more than fifteen for the youthful, skeletally skinny Heechee boy. Harold Wroczek was a tall child with pale hair and blueberry-colored eyes. But he was not much taller than Sneezy, whose people were all emaciated and elongated by human standards.

  To Harold’s annoyance, the other thing he was not more of than Sneezy was strong. Under that dry, leathery Heechee skin were powerful tendons and muscles. Though Harold tried to climb the handholds to the docking levels faster than Sneezy, the Heechee boy kept up easily. He was off the top of the ladder before Harold was, so Harold panted up to him: “You watch it, Dopey! Don’t get in the way of the workthings!”

  Sneezy didn’t bother to answer. Not even a two-year-old on the Wheel would have been stupid enough to get in the way on such an occasion. The ships came only four or five times in a standard year. They didn’t linger. They didn’t dare to, and no one dared delay them.

  So as soon as the boys were in the huge spindle-shaped space of Bay 2, they retreated as close to a wall as they could, well away from the scurrying carrythings and the grown-ups arriving to watch the ship come in.

  All the landing docks, Bay 2 included, were on the inside of the Wheel. Its external shell was transparent at that point, but there wasn’t anything to be seen through it yet except the inside curve of the Wheel itself with the other two landing docks, identical to the one they were in but empty, peering in at them.

  “I can’t see the ship,” Harold complained.

  Sneezy didn’t answer. The only answer was to say that of course Harold could not, since the ship was still approaching faster than the speed of light, but Harold had explained often enough to Sneezy that he didn’t enjoy the dumb Heechee habit of giving answers everybody knew to questions that weren’t really meant to be answered.

  Traffic to the Wheel was almost all one-way, except for people. The human and Heechee complement were sent back when their tours of duty were over, usually roughly the equivalent of three standard Earth years. Then they went back to the Galaxy and their homes, wherever those might be. Most went to Earth, quite a few to Peggys Planet, others to one of the habitats. (Even the Heechee usually went to some human planet or place rather than back to their real homes in the core, because of time dilation and mostly because there was too much need for Heechee in one capacity or another outside it.) But supplies never went back. Machinery, instruments, parts, recreational materials, medical outfits, food—they stayed. When the items were consumed or broken or outmoded (or when the food supplies passed through the bodies of Wheel inhabitants to become excrement), they were recycled or simply retained as extra mass for the Wheel. Extra mass was a good thing. The more mass the Watch Wheel had, the less it would be affected by movements inside it, and so the less energy would have to be expended to keep it spinning straight and true.

  So the cargo-handling carrythings had little to do while the ship was coming in, only to stack the personal possessions of returning personnel. There wasn’t much of that; there were only eight families to be rotated.

  A mellow note sounded; the ship was in normal space.

  The dockmaster stood over his screens and boards, checked the readings, and called, “Lights!” It wasn’t an order. It was a courtesy for the audience, just to let them know what was happening; the actual extinguishing of the lights, like almost everything else that happened, was controlled by the sensors and the docking programs.

  The lights in Bay 2 went out. So, in the same moment, did all the lights on the rest of the Wheel visible through the shell.

  And then Sneezy could see the sky.

  There was not much to see. There weren’t any stars. The only stars bright enough to be seen from the Watch Wheel were those from their own galaxy, and their eyes didn’t happen to be pointed that way. There were other galaxies by the hundreds of millions in their line of sight, but only a few dozen of them were naked-eye objects, and those only pale, tiny smudges of firefly light.

  Then, as the Wheel slowly spun through its endless round, the westernmost of the smudges dipped out of sight, and the onlookers murmured.

  A pale colorless flicker of light, hard to see, painful to the eyes when seen…and then, abruptly, like a slide projected without warning on a screen, there was the ship.

  The supply ship was immense, itself a spindle 800 meters long. The shape meant that this time it was an original-Heechee ship, not one of the new human-built ones. Sneezy felt a special glow. He didn’t have anything against the human ships, which were usually either torpedo-shaped or simple cylinders. As everybody knew, the shape made no difference at all in interstellar travel. They could just as easily have been spheres or cubes or chrysanthemums; the shape was only a matter of the whims of the designers. Most of the supply ships that visited the Watch Wheel were human-made and human-crewed—and generally loaded with human recruits, too, so that that minor fraction of the Wheel’s complement that was Heechee was still further outnumbered.

  A Heechee ship might mean more Heechee to redress the balance! So thought Sneezy…

  But not this time.

  The great spindle settled inside the embrace of the Wheel. Its approach course was a corkscrew turn, beginning to twirl to match the Wheel’s own slow spin, so that by the time its teat was touching the hatch of Bay 2 they were synchronized. Rings meshed. Seals locked. From the aft quarters of the ship, cables spun out to the capstans at Bays 1 and 3, securing themselves and tightening to make the ship an integral part of the structure of the Wheel. The mass shifters in the utility conduits shuddered and chugged, adjusting the balance of the Wheel to match the new increments. Harold stumbled, off balance, as the floor twitched beneath them. Sneezy caught him, and Harold shoved him away. “You take care of yourself, Dopey,” he instructed.

  But then the ship was securely locked in, and its wonders began to pour out.

  The carrythings were the first to spring into action, hurrying into the cargo hatches and emerging with crates and bales and articles of furnishings and machines. Most could not be identified by sight, but the cargo bay was suddenly brightened with lovely smells as the handlers offloaded crates of fresh fruit, peaches and oranges and berries. “Wow! Gosh! Look at those bananas!” cried Harold as a handler came off the ramp with all four limbs upraised, each one holding a stalk of unripe fruit. “I wish I had one right now!”

  “You aren’t supposed to eat them until they turn yellow,” Sneezy pointed out with pride in his knowledge of strange human foods. He got a withering glare from Harold.

  “I know that. I mean I wish I had one ripe one now. Or some of those what-do-you-call-them berries.”

  Sneezy bent to whisper to his pod for help, then straightened up. “They are strawberries,” he stated. “I wish I had some, too.”

  “Strawberries,” Harold whispered. It had been a long time since he had seen a strawberry. The Wheel grew or manufactured most of its own food, but no one had yet got around to a berry patch. It was easy enough to make food with strawberry flavor—or any other flavor imaginable for that matter; CHON-food was endlessly variable. But the crispness, the texture, the smell—no, there was always a difference between CHON-food and the real stuff, and the difference was that the real stuff was wonderful. The boys slid carefully closer to the stacked crates of fruit, inhaling deeply. There was space between the crates and the wall of the bay, out of the way of t
he carrythings, and the boys fit into that space as no adult could. “I think those are raspberries,” said Harold, peering across stacks of lettuce and carrots and scarlet-ripe tomatoes. “And look, cherries!”

  “I would like to have some strawberries best,” said Sneezy wistfully, and a carrything, gently setting down a box marked “Instruments—Fragile,” paused as though listening. It was. It heard. Two of its long handling arms extended themselves to the crates of strawberries, opened one of the crates, extricated a little basket of fruit, resealed the end of the crate, and reached over the other crates to hand the basket to Sneezy. “Why, thank you!” said Sneezy, surprised but polite.

  “You are welcome, Sternutator,” said the carrything in Heechee. Sneezy jumped.

  “Oh! Do I know you?”

  “I was your tai-chi teacher,” the carrything announced. “Give some to Harold.” Then it turned and raced off for the next load.

  Harold looked resentful for a moment, then dismissed the emotion as unworthy—who would be jealous of the attentions of a low-grade machine intelligence? The two boys divided the fruit, nipping each berry between fingertips by its short green stem and nibbling it away. The strawberries were perfect. Fully ripe, sugar-sweet, taste fulfilling all the promise of look and smell.

  “The people will be out in a minute,” Harold announced, chewing blissfully—and was surprised to see Sneezy suddenly stop eating. The Heechee boy’s eyes were staring at the ship.

  Following the direction of Sneezy’s eyes, Harold saw the first of the passengers at last emerging. There were fifteen or twenty of them, adults and children.

  That was always interesting, of course. It was the biggest reason the boys were there, to see what new companions or rivals the ship might be bringing them. But the expression on Sneezy’s face was not just curiosity. It was either anger or fear—astonishment, at least, Harold decided, annoyed as he always was because Heechee expressions were hard for a human to read. The newcomers looked human enough to Harold, though there was something about the way they walked, hard to see at this distance, that was odd.

  Harold looked again, and saw something else.

  The Wheel had turned a bit farther.

  Now, just past the bulk of the ship, out in the emptiness of intergalactic space, was the cluster of patches of dirty-yellow light the Wheel was there to watch.

  The light was not really yellow to begin with, of course. Spectroscopy showed that far more than ninety percent of the radiation from the kugelblitz was in the violet end of the optical spectrum and beyond; but those frequencies were bad for human or Heechee eyes. The transparent shell had been doped to exclude them. Only the yellow came through.

  Harold grinned in satisfaction. “What’s the matter, Dopey?” he said patronizingly. “You suddenly scared about the kugelblitz?”

  Sneezy blinked those great, pink, odd-looking Heechee eyes at him. “Scared of the kugelblitz? No. What are you talking about?”

  “You look so funny,” Harold explained.

  “I’m not funny. I’m mad. Look at that!” Sneezy waved a skinny arm at the dock. “That’s a Heechee ship! And the people are all wearing Ancestor pods! But every one of those people is human.”

  If Harold had been a Heechee boy instead of a very human one, he wouldn’t have laughed about the kugelblitz.

  The kugelblitz was not a laughing matter. The kugelblitz was where the Foe lived—the beings the Heechee called “the Assassins.” The Heechee had not given them that name as a jest. To the Heechee there was nothing jestable about the Foe. Heechee didn’t laugh at dangerous things. They ran away from them.

  That was another significant difference between Sneezy and Harold. And then there was Oniko, who was different still.

  Oniko Bakin was one of the new arrivals. Her contingent of replacements included twenty-two humans and no Heechee at all. Four of them were children, and the one who turned up in Sneezy’s school was Oniko. When she appeared for classes on her first day, the other children clustered around her. “But you’re human,” one said. “So why do you wear a Heechee pod?”

  “We always have,” she explained. Then she courteously shushed them to pay attention to the teacherthing.

  Oniko was indeed human. She was also female, and just about Sneezy’s age. Her skin was pale olive. Her eyes were black and hooded with an epicanthic fold. Her hair was straight and black, and Sneezy was proud to be able to identify her by these signs as one of that sub-genre of human beings called “Oriental.” She spoke colloquial English, though. To Sneezy’s surprise, she spoke colloquial Heechee, too. Lots of humans spoke a little Heechee, more or less, but Oniko was the first in Sneezy’s experience who was equally at home in both the language of Do and the language of Feel.

  That did not lessen his astonishment at seeing a human child wearing a pod.

  In eurhythmics, that first day she was in school with him, Oniko became his partner for stretch-and-bend movements. Sneezy got a close-up look at her. Although he still thought that her flesh was distressingly flabby and her mass worrisomely large, he liked the sweet smell of her breath and the gentle way she spoke his name—not “Dopey,” not even “Sneezy,” but “Sternutator,” in the Heechee tongue. He was disappointed when their housething called early to take her out of school for some formality with her parents, because he wanted to know her better.

  At home that night he tried asking his father why a human being should wear a pod. “Very simple, Sterny,” Bremsstrahlung said wearily. “They were a lost catch.”

  The reason Bremsstrahlung was tired was that he had been doing double duty. All the watchers had. The times when a ship was docked at the Wheel were thought to be specially vulnerable, since a certain amount of confusion was inevitable. At such times every Dream Seat was manned and all the watchers kept on duty until the ship had departed and the Wheel was secure once more. It had been a very long shift for Bremsstrahlung. “A lost catch,” he explained, “is a group of human beings who flew one of our ships to a one-way destination. As to this one, ask your mother; she talked to the ship’s crew.”

  “Only for a moment,” Femtowave protested. “I was hoping for news from Home.”

  Bremsstrahlung patted her fondly. “What news could there be when they left only—what was it, three or four hours after we did?”

  Femtowave acknowledged the correctness of his observation with a flexion of her throat. She said in amusement, “The poor crew still was in shock. They were all Heechee. They left the core with specialists and materials to go to Earth, stopped there, were loaded with supplies for us, stopped on the way to pick up the new people from the lost catch—oh, how confusing it all must be for them!”

  “Exactly,” said Bremsstrahlung. “Anyway, once the original humans reached the artifact, they couldn’t leave. So then they were stuck there forever.”

  “If it were forever—” Femtowave smiled “—they would not be here now, Bremmy.” She did not smile in the human way, since Heechee musculature is not the same. What happened was that a knot of muscle gathered below her cheekbones. The taut flesh itself did not move.

  “You know what I mean,” her husband said. “Anyway, Sternutator, this little group of less than one hundred humans turned out to be very rich in sensitives.” He said it demurely. To be a sensitive meant that one was particularly good at using the Dream Seat to “listen” for signs of external intelligence, and of course Bremsstrahlung himself was among the most sensitive beings ever found. That was why he was on the Wheel.

  “Will Oniko work in the Dream Seat?” Sneezy asked.

  “Of course not! At least, not until she grows up. You know that it is not only important to be able to receive any impressions that may come. A particularly gifted child might be able to do that, but it is just as important to be able to refrain from broadcasting one’s own feelings.”

  “More important,” Femtowave corrected. There was no smiley knot of muscle on her cheek now. That was nothing to smile about.

  “More
important, I agree,” said her husband. “As to whether this child is a sensitive or not, well, there’s no way for me to know that. She will be tested. Probably she already has been, as you were, since surely one of her own parents must be a sensitive, and there is quite a strong genetic component involved.”

  “Does that mean that I will work in the Dream Seat when I grow up?” Sneezy asked eagerly.

  “We don’t know that yet,” his father said. He thought for a moment, and then added somberly, “For that matter, we don’t know if the Wheel will still be here—”

  “Bremsstrahlung!” his wife cried. “That is nothing to joke about!”

  Bremsstrahlung nodded but didn’t say anything. He was really quite tired. Perhaps, he told himself, that was why he hadn’t been joking.

  Actually, Sneezy’s best witness about the human girl was Oniko herself. She was assigned to his schoolhall, and of course the schoolthing introduced her at once to the other students. “Oniko,” it said, “was born on a Food Factory, and hasn’t had much chance to know much about the world. So please help her when you can.”

  Sneezy was willing. The chances didn’t come very often, though. He was not the only child curious about the newcomer, and most of the others, being human, were far more forward than he.

  Sneezy’s school was almost like the storied one-room red schoolhouse of American antiquity. There really was only one room. It was different from the antique, though, in that it didn’t have just one teacher, or not exactly. Each student got quite individual instruction, with his or her own custom-tailored battery of learning programs. The schoolthing was a mobile unit. It cruised around the room as needed, mostly to keep discipline and to see that none of the students was still eating his lunch when he should have been parsing sentences. It did not teach. For that purpose each student had his own carrel.

  When the schoolthing had finished counting heads and checking on the reasons for any absences, it bustled around, making sure of clean hands and freedom from symptoms of illness—and, in the case of the youngest pupils, fastening the seat belts that kept them in their carrels. Not to mention escorting them to the toilet as needed, not to mention all the other functions required for children who, a few of them, were still quite tiny.