“Thank you,” said Sneezy in return. He wasn’t sure what he was thanking her for, but it seemed polite.
Harold was not in a polite mood. “What we had to learn from the Heechee,” he said, “was how to be cowards. And we just wouldn’t learn that!”
Sneezy felt the knots of muscles at his shoulders gather. Heechee emotions aren’t the same as human emotions, but even the Heechee can feel annoyance. He said unsteadily, “I do not want you to call me a coward, Harold.”
Doggedly, Harold said, “Oh, I’m not talking about you personally, Dopey, but you know as well as I do what the Heechee did. They just ran away and hid.”
“I do not want you to call me Dopey, either, anymore.”
Harold jumped to his feet. “And what are you going to do about it?” he sneered.
Sneezy rose more slowly, wondering at himself He was ill at ease in the gloomy palm grove, but he was also beginning to shake for other reasons. “I am going to tell you that it is wrong for you to call me that. No one else does.”
“No one else knows you as well as I do,” Harold said stubbornly. Sneezy perceived that the human boy’s feelings had been hurt in some way-it did not occur to Sneezy to use the word “jealousy.” Harold’s forearms were raised, his fists were clenching; why, Sneezy marveled, it looked as though he wanted to fight.
Perhaps he would have. Perhaps Sneezy would have fought him back. Heechee did not usually practice violence on each other, but Sneezy was a very young Heechee, not as civilized as he would be in another decade or so.
What stopped them had nothing to do with civilization. It was Oniko. She made a gagging sound, glared at the coconut in her hand in revulsion, then suddenly flung it away.
“Oh, my God,” she said in strangled tones, and began to vomit profusely.
When the two boys got her down to the classroom, the schoolthing, which possessed paramedical skills among all its others, reproached them bitterly for letting the poor child drink so much of an unfamiliar juice. As penance they had to escort her to her apartment and stay there with her until a parent returned.
So both Harold and Sneezy were late for dinner. “Hurry it up, can’t you?” Harold complained, just behind him in the downshaft. “I’m going to get smacked!”
Sneezy was already hurrying as much as he could, swinging down from one handhold to another on the descending cable. He was not afraid of being smacked. Neither of his parents would strike a child, but he was impatient to see them. There were questions he wanted to ask. As they hurried down the long passageway to the crossway where both their homes were, Sneezy right, Harold left, he was framing the questions in his mind.
And then they stopped short. Sneezy hissed in surprise. Harold groaned, “Aw, shit.”
They both heard the piercing metallic-electronic squeal that seemed to go right through bone into brain. To make sure they noticed, the ceiling lights flashed on and off three measured times. And all the voices of all the workthings awoke at once: “Drill!” the nearest ones called to the boys. “Take rest positions at once! Empty your minds! Lie still! This is a Drill!”
I wish I had a better way of talking to meat people.
I wish it were possible for me to tell about Sneezy and Oniko and the Wheel as I experienced them. I don’t mean that I experienced them directly. I didn’t; I wasn’t there. But I just as well might have been, because everything that happened on the Wheel, like everything that happened anywhere in the Galaxy, was recorded somewhere in gigabit space, and thus available to those who had been vastened. Like me.
So, in a certain sense, I was there. (Or “was” there.) But while I was accessing that particular store I was also doing forty-eleven other things, some of them interesting, some of them important, some of them just a lot more of that poking around among the yearnings and sorrows inside my head that I seem to keep on doing all the time. I don’t know how to convey all that.
I don’t mean that I wasn’t paying attention to the story of the kids. I was. They touched me. There is something infinitely heart-melting, for me anyway, about the courage of kids.
I don’t mean the physical, fistfight and name-calling kind of courage, like when Sneezy stood up to Harold, though that was very brave (if not actually sociopathic) behavior for a Heechee boy to exhibit. I mean the way a child can stand up to a real danger, maybe even an irresistible and undefeatable danger. It’s futile and hopeless and heartbreaking, like a two-week kitten mewing defiance to an escaped pit bull. It melts me.
Albert isn’t always tolerant of the way I feel about kids. He tells me sometimes that Essie and I probably should have had children of our own, and then maybe I wouldn’t idealize them the way I do. Maybe so. But regardless of whatever I maybe should have done or possibly wouldn’t be, I do have this sudden rush of liquefaction around the region of the heart (well, the analog, at least, of the physical heart I once had but don’t have anymore) when I see kids doing what they must do in the face of the overwhelming fear.
Actually, neither Harold nor Sneezy was that frightened at first. A Drill was a Drill. They’d had plenty of Drills before. They flopped where they were. They closed their eyes. They waited.
This was no Class Two Drill, like the landing of a ship. It was an all-out alert, the kind that happened at random times and had to be carried out perfectly. As soon as the warning whistle quieted down, the rest of the Wheel did, too. The workthings that had no duties turned themselves to standby and stood frozen. The lights dimmed themselves to murk, just enough to make things out. The inertial sensors that monitored the spin of the Wheel gave their mass shifters one more pat into place and shut down; so did the vertical lift cables; so did all the other nonessential inorganic (or no longer organic) machines and intelligences of the Wheel.
Sneezy and Harold were shut down too, or as close to it as active children can get. Among the required courses for every child in the Wheel’s schoolhalls was practice in what some people used to call “satori,” the blanking of the mind. They were quite good at it. Lying curled like a fetus next to the equally curled Harold, Sneezy’s mind was emptied of everything but the gray-gold, not-warm-not-cold, not-bright not-dark haze of abandonment of self.
Or almost.
Of course, you could never achieve perfection at satori. An attempt to be perfect was itself an imperfection. There were thoughts stirring in Sneezy’s fog. Questions. Questions about Oniko that Sneezy still wanted very much to ask his parents. Questions about whether-by some ternble chance-this Drill might just possibly be no Drill at all but reality.
The deck of the Wheel felt dead under his cheek. No buzz of air pumps or whine of cable motors. No voices. No rustle or footstep of anyone moving. No irregular, satisfying thump and rumble as the mass shifters worked to keep the Wheel turning true.
Sneezy waited. As the questions tried to form themselves in his mind, he separated himself from them, letting them dwindle away half formed. Until one question began to recur insistently:
Why was this particular Drill lasting so long?
In fact, it was over an hour before the nearest cleanerthing suddenly jerked itself erect again. It pointed its sensor toward the two boys and said, “The Drill is over. You can get up now.”
They didn’t need to be told, of course. Even before the cleanerthing’s words were spoken the Wheel began to come back to life. Lights sprang up. Distant whines and thumps and shudders said that all the caretaking machinery was turning itself on again. Harold jumped up, grinning. “I guess my dad had to go on duty,” he cried happily; the translation of that remark was, So he won’t remember I was late . . .