Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (41 page)

We strolled down to the edge of the icy water, holding hands. “Why, is snowing,” Essie announced, peering up at the bubble seven hundred meters over our heads. Usually you can’t see it very clearly, but tonight, edge-lighted from the heaters that keep snow or ice from crumbling it, it was a milky dome, broken with reflections from lights on the ground, stretching from horizon to horizon.

“Is it too cold for you?”

“Perhaps just here, near the water,” she acknowledged. We climbed back up the slope to the little palm grove by the fountain and sat on a bench to watch the lights on Tappan Sea. It was comfortable there. The air never gets really cold under the bubble, but the water is the Hudson, running naked through seven or eight hundred kilometers before it hits the Palisades Dam, and every once in a while in winter chunks of sheet ice bob under the barriers and wind up rubbing against our boat dock.

“Essie,” I said, “I’ve been thinking.”

“Know that, dear Robin,” she said.

“About the Oldest One. The machine.”

“Oh, really?” She pulled her feet up to get them off the grass, damp from vagrant drifts from the fountain. “Very fine machine,” she said. “Quite tame, since you pulled its teeth. Provided is not given external effectors, or mobility, or access to control circuits of any kind-yes, quite tame.”

“What I want to know,” I said, “is whether you could build one like it for a human being.”

“Ah!” she said. “Hum. Yes, I think so. Would take some time and, of course, large sums of money, but yes.”

“And you could store a human personality in it-after the person died, I mean? As well as the Dead Men were stored?”

“Quite a good bit better, would say. Some difficulties. Mostly biochemical, not my department.” She leaned back, looking upward at the iridescent bubble overhead and said consideringly: “When I write computer program, Robin, I speak to computer, in some language or other. I tell it what it is and what it is to do. Heechee programming is not the same. Rests on direct chemical readout of brain. Old Ones brain is not chemically quite identical with yours and mine, therefore Dead Man storage is very far from perfect. But Old Ones must be much farther from actual Heechee, for whom process was first developed. Heechee man-aged to convert process without any apparent difficulty, therefore it can be done. Yes. When you die, dear Robin, is possible to read your brain into a machine, then put machine in Heechee ship and fly it off to Sagittarius YY black hole, where it can say hello to Gelle-Klara Moynlin and explain episode was not your fault. For this you have my guarantee, only you must not die for, say, five to eight years yet, to allow for necessary research. Will you promise that for me, please.”

There are times when something catches me so by surprise that I don’t know whether to cry, or get angry, or laugh. In this case I stood up quickly and stared down at my dear wife. And then I decided which to do, and laughed. “Sometimes you startle me, Essie,” I said.

“But why, Robin?” She reached out and took my hand. “Suppose it was the other way around, hey? Suppose it was I who, many years ago, had been through a very great personal tragedy. Exactly like yours, Robin. In which someone I loved very much was harmed very severely, in such a way that I could never see that person or explain to her what happened. Do you not think I would want very much to at least speak to her again, in some way, to tell her how I felt?”

I started to answer, but she stood up and put her finger on my lips. “Was rhetorical question, Robin. We both know answer. If your Kiara is still alive, she will want very much to hear from you. This is beyond doubt. So,” she said, “here is plan. You will die-not soon, I hope. Brain will go into machine. Maybe will make extra copy for me, you permit? But one copy flies off to black hole to look for Kiara, and finds her, and says to her, ‘Kiara, dear, what happened could not be helped, but wish you to know I would have given life itself to save you.’ And then, Robin, do you know what Kiara will answer to this strange machine that appears out of nowhere, perhaps only a few hours, her time, after incident itself?”

I didn’t! The whole point was that I didn’t! But I didn’t say so, because Essie didn’t give me a chance. She said, “Then Kiara will answer, ‘Why, Robin dear, I know you would. Because of all men ever born you are the one whom I most trust and respect and love.’ I know she would say this, Robin, because for her it would be true. As it is for me.”

At six o’clock on Robin Broadhead’s tenth birthday, he had a party. The woman next door gave him socks, a board game and, as a sort of joke present, a book entitled Everything We Know About the Heechee. Their tunnels had only recently been discovered on Venus, and there was much conjecture about the location of the place where the Heechee went, their physical appearance and their purposes. The joke part of the book was that, although it contained a hundred and sixty pages, all of them were blank.

At that same time on that same day-or at any rate, at its equivalent in local time, which was a great deal different-a person was taking a turn under the stars before retiring for sleep. He was also anticipating an anniversary of a sort, but not a party. He was a long way from Robin Broadhead’s birthday cake and candles, more than forty thousand light-years; and a long way from the appearance of a human being. He had a name, but out of respect and because of the work he had done, he was usually called something which translates as “Captain”. Over his squared-off, finely furred head the stars were extremely bright and close. When he squinted up at them they hurt his eyes, in spite of the carefully designed glass-like shell that covered the place he lived and much of his entire planet. Sullen red type-Ms. brighter than the Moon as seen from Earth. Three golden Cs. A single hot, straw-colored F, painful to look at. There were no Os or Bs in his sky. There were also no faint stars at all. Captain could identify every star he saw, because there were only ten thousand or so of them, nearly all cool and old ones, and even the dimmest clearly visible to the naked eye. And beyond those familiar thousands-well, he could not see beyond them, not from where he strolled, but he knew from his many spaceflights that past them all was the turbulent, almost invisible, bluetinged shell that surrounded everything he and his people owned of the universe. It was a sky that would have terrified a human being. On this night, rehearsing in his mind what would happen after he woke, it almost frightened the captain.

Wide of shoulder and hip, narrow front to back, the captain waddled as he walked back to the belt that would bring him to his sleeping cocoon. It was a short trip. By his perceptions, only a few minutes. (Forty thousand light-years away Robin Broadhead ate, slept, entered junior high, smoked his first dope, broke a bone in his wrist and had it knit, and put on nearly ten kilos before the captain got off the belt.) The captain said good-night to his drowsy roommates (two of whom were, from time to time, his sexual mates as well), removed the necklaces of rank from his shoulders, unstrapped the life-support and communications unit from between his wide spaced legs, raised the lid of his cocoon, and slipped inside. He turned over eight or ten times, covering himself with the soft, spongy, dense sleeping litter. The captain’s people had come from burrowers rather than scamperers across a plain. They slept best as their prehistoric ancestors had slept. When the captain had made himself comfortable, he reached one skinny hand up through the litter to pull the top of the cocoon closed. As he had done all of his life. As all of his people had done to sleep well. As they had pulled the stars themselves over to cover them when they decided on the necessity for a very long and worrisome sleep for all of them.

The joke of Robin’s birthday book was a little spoiled, because it was not quite true. Some things were known about the Heechee. In some ways it was evident that they were very unlike human beings, but in very significant ways-the same! In curiosity. Only curiosity could have led them to visit so many strange places, so very far apart. In technology. Heechee science was not the same as human, but it rested on the same thermodynamics, the same laws of motion, the same stretch of the mind into tininess and immensity, the nuclear particle and the universe itself. In basic chemistry of the body. They breathed quite similar air. They ate quite compatible food.

What was central to what everyone knew about the Heechee- or hoped, or guessed-was that they were not really, when you came right down to it, all that different from human beings. A few thousand years ahead, maybe, in civilization and science. Maybe not even that much. And in that what everyone guessed (or hoped) was not wrong. Less than eight hundred years passed between the time the first crude Heechee ship ventured to try mass-cancellation as a means of transport and the time when their expeditions had washed over most of the Galaxy. (In Olduvai Gorge, one of Squint’s ancestors puzzled over what to do with the antelope bone his mother had given him.)

Eight hundred years-but what years!

The Heechee exploded. There were a billion of them. Then ten. Then a hundred. They built wheeled and rollered vehicles to conquer the unfamiliar surface of their planet, and in no more than a couple of generations were off into space on rockets; a few generations more, and they were searching the planets of nearby stars. They learned as they went. They deployed instruments of immense size and great subtlety-a neutron star for a gravity detector; an interferometer a light-year across to catch and measure the radio waves from galaxies whose red-shifts approached the limit. The stars they visited and the galaxies they gazed at were almost identical with those seen from Earth-astronomical time does not trouble with a few hundred thousand years-but they saw more keenly and understood more thoroughly.

And what they saw and understood was, at the end, of surpassing importance to them. For Albert’s conjecture was true-nearly true-true in every detail up to the point at which it became terribly false.

As a result of their understanding, the Heechee did what seemed to them best.

They recalled all their far-flung expeditions, tidying behind them to carry away everything that might be useful and could be moved.

They studied some million stars and from those chose a few thousand-some to cast away, because they were dangerous, some to bring together. It was not hard for them to do. The ability to cancel mass or create meant that the forces of gravity were their servants. They selected a population of stable stars and long-lived, winnowed out the dangerous ones, and brought them together, or near enough together to do what they wanted off them. Black holes come in all sizes. A certain concentration of matter in a certain volume of space and gravity wraps it closed. A black hole can be as big as a galaxy, with its component stars hardly closer than in our own. The Heechee’s plans were not so grand. They sought a volume of space a few dozen light-years across, filled it with stars, entered it in their ships. .

And watched it close around them.

From that time on the Heechee were sealed off from the rest of the universe, burrowed into their nest of stars. Time changed for them. Within a black hole the flow of time slows-slows greatly. In the universe outside more than three-quarters of a million years went by. Within, what seemed to Captain no more than a couple of decades. While they were stamping out comfortable nests for themselves in their captured planets (long since hewn into livability; they had had nearly a century in which to work), the mild, gentle Pliocene epoch gave place to the storms and siroccos of the Pleistocene. The Gtinz ice crept down from the north, and retreated; then the Mindel, the Riss, the Worm. The Australopithecines Captain had kidnapped-to help along, perhaps, or at least to study in the hope of finding hope in them-disappeared, a failed experiment. Pithecanthropus appeared, and was gone; Heidelberg man; the Neanderthalers. They crept north and south as the ice directed, inventing tools, learning to bury their dead and ring them with a circle of ibex horns, learning-beginning to learn-to speak. Land bridges sprouted between the continents, and were washed away. Over some of them scared, starving primitive tribes crept, a wave from Asia that ultimately flowed down from Alaska to Cape Horn, another wave that stayed where it was, growing pads of fat around the sinuses to shield its lungs against the stinging Arctic cold. The children that Captain fathered in the warrens of Venus, and kept with him while he and his teams surveyed the Earth and selected the most promising of its primates for acquisition, were not yet fully grown when homo sapiens learned the uses of fire and the wheel.

And time passed.

Each beat of Captain’s twin hearts took half a day in the universe outside. When the Sumerians came down from their mountains to invent the city on the Persian plateau, Captain was invited to participate in the forthcoming anniversary talk. As he prepared his guest list, Sargon built an empire. While he instructed his machines with the program for the meeting small, shivering men hewed blue stone into menhirs to form Stonehenge. Columbus discovered America while Captain was fretful over last-minute cancellations and changes; he finished his evening meal while the first human rockets tottered into orbit and decided to stretch his legs before retiring as a human explorer, wild with surprise, broke into the first Heechee tunnel on Venus. He slept through the time of Robin Broadhead’s growth, puberty, voyage to Gateway and voyages from it, the discovery of the Food Factory, the decision to explore it. He half woke just as the Herter-Hall party was starting its four-year climb to orbit, and went back to sleep-to him it was the equivalent of less than an hour-through all their wearying trip. Captain, after all that, was still relatively young. He had the equivalent of a good ten years of active, energetic life ahead of him-or what the outside universe would see as a quarter of a million years.