Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (35 page)

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.

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 part 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.”

She paused beside the gleaming couch. “Is this another joke, Tor, or a riddle?”

“No.” He tugged soberly at the forks of his beard with both hands. “You will not like this one, Danine.”

“Thanks.”

He grinned, to crinkle the corners of his sad, soft eyes. “But it is the last I can give you. Perhaps-perhaps the Oldest One will then give you a dream out of his own. It is said that he has sometimes done that, but I do not know when. Not in any person’s memory.”

Janine swallowed. “It sounds scary,” she said.

He said kindly, “It frightened me very much when I had it, Danine, but remember that it is only a dream, for you.” And he closed the cocoon over her, and Janine fought for a moment against the sleep, and failed as always . . . and was someone else.

Once there was a creature. It was female; but it was not an “it”, if Descartes is to be believed, because it was aware of its own existence, and therefore it was a “she”.

She had no name. But she was marked among her fellows by a great scar from ear to nose, where the hoof of a dying prey-beast had nearly killed her. Her eye on that side had healed with the lid pulled out of shape, and so she might be called “Squint”.

Squint had a home. It was not elaborate. It was no more than a trampled-out nest in a clump of something like papyrus, partly sheltered by a hummock of earth. But Squint and her relatives returned to those nests every day and in this they were unlike any of the other living things that resembled them. In one other respect they were quite unlike anything else they grew up with, and that was that they used objects that were not parts of their bodies to do work for them. Squint was not beautiful. She stood not much over a meter tall. She had no eyebrows-the hair on her scalp merged with them, and only her nose and cheekbones were bare-and she had no chin to speak of. Her hands had fingers, but they were usually clenched so that the backs of them were scarred and callused, and the fingers did not separate well-not much better than the fingers of her feet, which were almost as good at grasping things, and better at gouging out the vulnerable parts of a creature unfortunate enough to find her arms wrapped around its neck as it tried to run away. Squint was pregnant, although she did not know that this was so. Squint was full grown and fully fertile by her fifth rainy season. In the thirteen years she had been alive she had been pregnant nine or ten times, and had never known it until she was forced to note that she could no longer run quite as fast, that the bulge in her belly made it more difficult to rake the guts out of a prey-animal and that her dugs began to swell again with milk. Of the fifty members of her community at least four were her children. More than a dozen of the males were, or might have been, the children’s fathers. Squint was aware of the former relationship, but not of the latter. At least one of the young males she knew to be a child of hers might well have been the father of another-a notion which would not have disturbed Squint, even if she had been capable of entertaining it. The thing she did with the males when the flesh beneath her skinny buttocks swelled and reddened was not in her mind related to childbirth. It was not related to pleasure, either. It was an itch that she suffered to be scratched whenever it happened. Squint had no way of defining “pleasure,” except perhaps as the absence of pain. Even in those terms, she knew little of it throughout her life.

When the Heechee lander bellowed and flamed above the clouds, Squint and all her community ran to hide. None of them saw it come to earth.

If a trawl scoops a starfish from the bottom of a sea, a spade lifts it from the bucket of ooze and dumps it in a tank, a biologist pins it down and dissects out its nervous system-does the starfish know what is happening to it?

Squint had more self-awareness than a starfish. But she had little more background of experience to inform her. Nothing that happened to her from the moment she saw a bright light shining in her eyes made sense. She did not feel the point of the anesthetic lance that put her to sleep. She did not know she was carried into the lander and dumped into a pen of twelve of her fellows. She did not feel the crushing acceleration when she took off, or the weightlessness for the long time they floated in transit. She did not know anything at all until she was allowed to waken again, and did not understand what she then experienced.

Nothing was familiar!

Water. The water Squint drank did not any longer come from the muddy brink of the river. It came in a shiny, hard trough. When she bent to lap it up nothing lurked beneath its surface to lunge at her.

Sun and sky. There was no sun! There were no clouds, and there was no rain. There were hard, blue-gleaming walls, and a blue-gleaming roof overhead.

Food. There was no live thing to catch and dismember. There were flat, tough, tasteless clods of chewy matter. They filled her stomach, and they were always available. No matter how much she and her fellows ate, there was always more.

Sights and sounds and smells-these were terrifying! There was a stink she had never smelled before, sharp in her nose and scary. It was the smell of something alive, but she never saw the creature that owned it. There was an absence of normal smells almost as bad. No smell of deer. No smell of antelope. No smell of cat (that one a blessing). No smell even of their own dung, or not very much, because they had no rushes to tramp into a home, and the places where they huddled together to sleep were sluiced clean every time they left them. Her baby was born there, while the rest of the tribe complained at her grunts because they wanted to sleep. When she woke to lift it to her, to relieve the hot pressure in her teats, it was gone. She never saw it again.

Squint’s newborn was the first to disappear immediately after birth. It was not the last. For fifteen years the little australopithecine family continued to eat and copulate and bear and grow old, its numbers dwindling because the infants were taken away as soon as born. One of the females would squat and strain and whimper and give birth. Then they would all go to sleep, and awaken with the little one gone. From time to time an adult would die, or come close enough to it to lie curled and moaning so that they knew it would not rise again. Then too they would all go to sleep; and that adult, or that adult’s body, would be gone when they woke. There were thirty of them, then twenty, then ten-then only one. Squint was the last, a very, very old female at twenty-nine. She knew she was old. She did not know she was dying, only that there was a terrible crushing pain in her belly that made her gasp and sob. She did not know when she was dead. She only knew that that particular pain stopped, and then she was conscious of another sort of pain. Not really pain. Strangeness. Numbness. She saw, but she saw queerly flatly, queerly flickeringly, in a queerly distorted range of colors. She was not used to her new vision, and did not recognize what she saw. She tried to move her eyes and they did not move. She tried to move head, or arms, or legs, and could not because she did not have any. She remained in that condition for some considerable time.