Beyond the Blue Event Horizon h-2 Page 26

  Well, for a minute there it looked like it was going to work. The Launch Director looked at the thumbprints on the register plate, picked up the spool of mission plan and weighed it in her hand, and then stared at me in silence for a moment, her mouth open. I could hear the whine of whatever volatile gas they were using in the heat engines, Carnot-cycling from under the Fresnel lenses to the shaded artichoke-shaped reflectors just above us. I didn’t hear anything else at all. Then she sighed and said, “Senator Praggler, have you been getting all that?”

  And from the air behind her desk came Praggler’s growl. “You bet your ass I have, Sally. Tell Broadhead it won’t work. He can’t have the ship.”

  It was the three days in transit that had done me in. Automatically the passport identities of all passengers were radioed ahead, and the officials had known I was coming before the shuttle left French Guiana. It was just chance that it was Praggler who was there to meet me; even if he hadn’t been, they had plenty of time to get orders from the headquarters in Brasilia. I thought for a while that because it was Praggler I could talk him out of it. I couldn’t. I yelled at him for thirty minutes and begged for thirty more. No good. “There’s nothing wrong with your mission plan,” he admitted. “What’s wrong is you. You’re not entitled to use Gateway facilities, because Gateway Corp preempted you yesterday, while you were in orbit. Even if it hadn’t, Robin, I wouldn’t let you go. You’re too personally involved. Not to mention too old for this kind of thing.”

  “I’m an experienced Gateway pilot!-“

  “You’re an experienced pain in the ass, Robin. And maybe a little bit crazy, too. What do you think one man could do on Heechee Heaven? No. We’ll use your plan. We’ll even pay you royalties on it-if it works. But we’ll do it the right way, from Gateway itself, with at least three ships going, two of them full of young, healthy, well armed daredevils.”

  “Senator,” I pleaded, “let me go! If you ship this computer to Gateway it’ll take months-years!”

  “Not if we send it right up there in the Five,” he said. “Six days. Then it can take right off again, in convoy. But not with you. However,” he said reasonably, “we’ll certainly pay you for the computer and for the program. Leave it at that, Robin. Let somebody else take the risks. I’m speaking as your friend.”

  Well, he was my friend and we both knew it, but maybe not as much of a friend as he had been, after I told him what he could do with his friendship. Finally Bover pulled me away. The last I saw of the Senator he was sitting on the edge of the desk staring after me, face still purple with rage, eyes looking as though they were getting ready to weep.

  “That’s tough luck, Mr. Broadhead,” said Bover sympathetically.

  I took a breath to straighten him out, too, and stopped myself just in time. There was no point in it. “I’ll get you a ticket back to Kourou,” I said.

  He smiled, showing perfectly chiseled Chiclets-he had been spending some of that money on himself. “You have made me a rich man, Mr. Broadhead. I can pay for my own ticket. Also, I’ve never been here before and will not likely come again, so I think I’ll stay a while.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “And you, Mr. Broadhead? What are your plans?”

  “I don’t have any.” Nor could I think of any. I had run out of programming. I cannot tell you how empty that feels. I had nerved myself up for another Heechee mystery-ship ride-well, not as much a mystery as when I was prospecting out of Gateway. But still a pretty scary prospect. I had taken a step with Essie that I had feared taking for a long time. And all for nothing.

  I stared wistfully down the long, empty tunnel toward the docks. “I might shoot my way through,” I said.

  “Mr. Broadhead! That’s-that’s-“

  “Oh, don’t worry. I’m not going to, mostly because all the guns I know anything about are already loaded onto that Five. And I doubt they’ll let me in to get one.”

  He peered into my face. “Well,” he said doubtfully, “perhaps you, too, might enjoy just spending a few days-“

  And then his expression changed.

  I hardly saw it; I was feeling what he felt, and that was enough to demand all my attention. Old Peter was in the couch again. Worse than ever. It was not just his dreams and fantasies that I was experiencing-that everyone alive was feeling. It was pain. Despair. Madness. There was a terrible sense of pressure around the temples, a flaming ache from arms and chest. My throat was dry, then raw with sour clots as I vomited.

  Nothing like that had ever come from the Food Factory before.

  But then no one had ever died in the couch before. It did not stop in a minute, or in ten. My lungs heaved in great starving gasps. So did Bover’s. So did everyone else’s, wherever they were in range of his transmission. The pain kept on, and every time it seemed to reach a plateau there was an explosion of new pain; and all the time there was the terror, the rage, the awful misery of a man who knew he was dying, and hated it.

  But I knew what it was.

  I knew what it was, and I knew what I could do-what at least my body could do, if I could only hold my mind together enough to make it. I forced myself to take a step, and then another. I made myself trot down that wide, weary corridor, when Bover was writhing on the ground behind me and the guards were staggering, completely helpless, ahead. I blundered past them and doubt they even saw me, into the narrow hatch of the lander, tumbling all bruised and shaken, forcing myself to dog it closed over my head.

  And there I was, in the disastrously familiar tiny cubbyhole, surrounded by shapes of molded tan plastic. Walthers had done his part of the job, at least. I had no way of paying him for it, but if he had put his hand in the port as I was closing it I would have given him a million.

  At some point old Peter Herter died. His death did not end the misery. It only began to slow it down. I could not have guessed what it would be like to be in the mind of a man who has died, while he feels his heart stop and his bowels loosen and the certainty of death stab into his brain. It goes on much longer than I would have believed possible. It was going on all the time I cut the lander loose and sent it up on its little hydrogen jets to where the Heechee drive could work. I jammed and heaved the course-guidance wheels about until they showed that well-learned pattern Albert had taught me.

  And then I squeezed the launch teat, and I was on my way. The ship began its lurchy, queasy acceleration. The star patterns I could see, barely see, by craning past a memory-storage unit, began to drift together. No one could stop me now. I could not even stop myself.

  By all the data Albert had been able to collect the trip would be twenty-two days exactly. Not very long-not unless you are squeezed into a ship that is already filled to capacity. There was room for me-more or less. I could stretch out. I could stand up. I could even lie down, if the vagrant motion of the ship let me know where “down” was, and if I did not mind being folded over between pieces of metal. What I could not do, for those twenty-two days, was move more than half a meter in any direction-not to eat, not to sleep, not to bathe or excrete; not for anything.

  There was plenty of time on my hands for the purpose of remembering how terrifying Heechee flight was, and to feel all of it.

  There was plenty of time, too, to learn. Albert had been careful to record for me all the data I had not had the wit to ask him for, and those tapes were available for me to play. They were not very interesting or sophisticated in delivery. The PMAL-2 was all memory: plenty of brain, not much display. There was no three-dimensional tank, only a stereo flatplate goggle system when my eyes would bear watching it, or a screen the size of the palm of my hand when they would not.

  At first I did not use it. I just lay there, sleeping as much as I could. Partly I was recovering from the trauma of Peter’s death, so terrifyingly like my own. Partly I was experimenting with the inside of my head-allowing myself to feel fear (when I had every reason for it!), encouraging myself to feel guilt. There are kinds of guilt that I know I cherish, the contempla
tion of obligations unmet and commitments undone. I had plenty of those to think about, beginning with Peter (who would almost surely have been still alive, if I had not accepted him for that expedition) and ending, or rather not ending, with Kiara in her frozen black hole-not ending because I could always think of others. That amusement staled before long. To my surprise I found that the guilt was not very overpowering after all, once I let myself feel it; and that took care of the first day.

  Then I turned to the tapes. I let the semi-Albert, the rigid, half-animated caricature of the program I knew and loved, lecture me on Mach’s Principle and gosh numbers and more curious forms of astrophysical speculation than I had ever dreamed of. I didn’t really listen, but I let the voice roll over me, and that was the second day.

  Then, from the same source, I poured into myself all that was stored about the Dead Men. I had heard almost all of it before. I heard it all again. I had nothing better to do, and that was the third day.

  Then there were miscellaneous lectures on Heechee Heaven and the provenance of the Old Ones and possible strategies for dealing with Henrietta and possible risks to be guarded against from the Old Ones, and that was the third day, and the fourth, and the fifth.

  I began to wonder how I would fill twenty-two of them, so I went back and did those tapes all over again, and that was the sixth day, and the eighth, and the tenth; and on the eleventh-On the eleventh I cut off the computer entirely, grinning to myself with anticipated pleasure.

  It was halfway day. I hung there in my restraining straps, waiting for the satisfaction of the one event this cramped and cussed trip could produce for me: the twinkling eruption of golden sparks of light in the crystal spiral that would signify turnover time. I didn’t know exactly when it would happen. Probably not in the first hour of the day (and it didn’t). Probably not, either, in the second or third . . . and it didn’t. Not in those hours, nor in the fourth, or fifth, or the ones after that. It did not happen at all on the eleventh day.

  Or on the twelfth.

  Or on the thirteenth.

  Or on the fourteenth; and when at last I punched in the data to check out the arithmetic I did not care to do in my head, the computer told me what I did not want to know.

  It was too late.

  Even if the halfway point occurred any time now-even in the next minute-there would not be water, food and air enough to carry me through to the end.

  There are economies one can make. I made them. I moistened my lips instead of drinking, slept all I could, breathed as shallowly as I knew how. And turnover at last did occur-on day nineteen. Eight days late.

  When I played the figures into the computer they came back cold and clear.

  The halfway point had come too late. Nineteen days from now the ship might well arrive at Heechee Heaven, but not with a living pilot aboard. By then I would have been dead for at least six.

  14 The Long Night of the Dreams

  As she began to be able to speak to the Old Ones they began to seem more like individuals to her. They were not really old, either. Or at least the three that most often guarded her and fed her and led her to her sessions in the long night of the dreams were not. They learned to call her Janine, or at least something close enough. Their own names were complicated, but each name had a short form-Tar, or Tor, or Hooay-and they responded to them, at need or just for play. They were as playful as puppies, and as solicitous. When she came out of the bright blue cocoon, racked and sweating from another life and another death-from another lesson, in this course that the Oldest One had prescribed for her-one of them was always there to coo and murmur and stroke.

  But it was not enough! There was no consolation enough to make up for what happened in the dreams, over and over.

  Every day was the same. A few hours of uneasy and unrestful sleep. A chance to eat. Maybe a game of tag or touch-tickle with Hooay or Tor. Perhaps a chance to wander about the Heaven, always guarded. Then Tar or Hooay or one of the others would tug her gently back to the cocoon and put her inside and then, for hours, sometimes for what seemed like the entire span of a life, Janine would be someone else. And such strange someones! Male. Female. Young. Old. Mad. Crippled-they were all different. None of them were quite human. Most were not human at all, especially the earliest, oldest someones.

  The lives she “dreamed” that were the closest in time were the nearest to her own. At least, they were the lives of creatures not unlike Tor or Tar or Hooay. They were not usually frightening, though all of them ended in death. In them she lived random and chaotic snatches of their stored memories of the short and chancy, or dull and driven, lives they had known. As she came to understand the language of her captors she found out that the lives she lived were those which had been specially selected (by what criteria?) to be stored. So each had some special lesson. All of the dreams were learning experiences for her, of course, and of course she learned. She learned how to speak to the living ones; to understand their overshadowed existences; to comprehend their obsessed need to obey. They were slaves! Or pets? When they did what the Oldest One told them they were obedient, and therefore good. When, rarely, they did not, they were punished.

  Between times she saw Wan sometimes, and sometimes her sister. They were kept apart from her as a matter of policy. At first she did not understand why; then she did, and laughed inside herself at the joke too secret to share with even jokey Tor. Lurvy and Wan were learning too, and taking it no better than she.

  By the end of the first six “dreams” she could speak to the Old Ones. Her lips and throat would not quite form their chirping, murmuring vowels, but she could make herself understood. More urgently, she could follow their orders. That saved trouble. When she was meant to return to her private cell they did not need to push her, and when she was supposed to bathe they did not have to strip her of her clothes. By the tenth lesson they were almost friendly. By the fifteenth she (and Lurvy and Wan as well) knew all they ever would about Heechee Heaven, including the fact that the Old Ones were not, and never had been, Heechee.

  Not even the Oldest One.

  And who was the Oldest One? Her lessons had not taught her that. Tar and Hooay explained, as best they could, that the Oldest One was God. That was not a satisfying answer. He was a god too much like his worshipers to have built Heechee Heaven or any part of it, including his own body. No. The Heaven was Heechee-built, for what purpose only the Heechee knew, and the Oldest One was not a Heechee.

  Through all this the great machine was immobile again, motionless, almost dead, conserving its dwindling remnant of life. When Janine crossed the central spindle she saw it there, still as a statue. Occasionally there was a sluggish flicker of pale color around its external sensors, as though it were on the verge of awakening, perhaps following them through half-closed eyes. When that happened, Hooay and Tar would quicken their step. There was no touch-tickle or joking then. Mostly it was absolutely still. She passed Wan in its very shadow one day, she going to the cocoon, he coming away, and Hooay dared to let them talk for a moment. “It looks scary,” Janine said.

  “I could destroy it for you, if you like,” Wan boasted, glancing nervously over his shoulder at the machine. But he had said it in English, and had the wisdom not to translate it for their guards. But even the tone of his voice made Hooay uneasy, and he hustled Janine away.

  Janine was becoming almost fond of her captors, as one might be of a great, gentle Malemute that could talk. It took her a long time to think of a young female like Tar as either young or female. They all had the same scraggly facial hair and the heavy supraorbital lobes characteristic of the mature male primate. But they began to become individuals, rather than specimens of the class “jailer”. The heavier and darker of the two males was called “Tor,” but that was only one syllable out of a long and subtle name from which Janine could only understand the word “dark”. It did not refer to his coloring. If anything, he was fairer than his fellows. It had something to do with an adventure of his childhood, in a par
t of the Heaven so strange and so seldom visited that there was little light from even the eternal Heechee-metal walls. Tor trimmed his beard so that it jutted down from his jaw in two inverted horns. Tor made the most jokes, and tried to share them with his prisoner. Tor was the one who jested with Janine, saying that if her male, Wan, was as infertile as he seemed to be while penned with Lurvy, he would ask the Oldest One for permission to impregnate her himself. Janine, cherishing her secret joke about their infertility, was not frightened. She was not repelled, either, because Tor was a kindly sort of satyr, and she believed she could recognize the jest. All the same, she began to think of herself as no longer a snotty kid. Each long dream aged her. In them she experienced the sexual intercourse she had never known in life-sometimes as a woman, sometimes not-and often pain, and always, at the end, death. The records could not be made from a living person, Hooay explained in a nonplayful moment; and his manner was not playful at all as he described the way in which the brain was opened and fed into the machine that made the records. She grew a little older while he was telling her.

  As the dreams went on, they became stranger and more remote. “You are going to very old times,” Tor told her. “This one now-“ he was leading her toward the cocoon “-is the very oldest, and therefore the last. Perhaps.”