“Mine too,” said Sneezy; then, struck by a thought: “And probably both of Oniko’s parents had to go on, so probably—”
“So probably they had to leave her alone anyway.” Harold nodded. “So what was the use of making us stay there? Dumb things!” he said, kicking the cleanerthing as they passed. “See you tomorrow.”
“Of course,” Sneezy said politely, and hurried home.
As expected, neither parent was there. The housething told him that his father had been called to the Dream Seats and his mother had been caught by the Drill far into the third sector of the Wheel. Both were on their way home.
His father arrived first, looking again tired. “Where’s your mother?” he asked. It was the housething that answered for Sneezy:
“Femtowave has been delayed by a slight problem; one of the maintenance circuits was sluggish in coming back on line after the Drill. Shall I prepare dinner?”
“Of course,” Bremsstrahlung grumbled, tired and irritable. “Why is this, Sternutator? Why haven’t you told the cookthing to start already? And besides,” he said, remembering, “why weren’t you here two hours ago?”
“Oniko was sick,” Sneezy explained.
Bremsstrahlung paused, his memory pouch half unslung, on his way to the airbath. “And is that now something that you must worry about? Are you now a mediething?”
Sneezy explained about the coconut juice. “We had to take her home.
I wanted to leave, Father,” he protested, “but her housethings told us to stay with her, and her Ancestor agreed.”
Ironically, Bremsstrahlung repeated, “Her ancestor?”
“No, of course I mean not really hers, Father, but she carries the Ancestor in her pod. Her name is Ophiolite, the Ancestor, I mean.”
“For a human,” Bremsstrahlung said approvingly, “this Oniko shows considerable intelligence. I have wondered why more humans don’t carry memory pouches. Of course, they don’t require the radiation as we do, but still, the pods are so convenient in other ways.”
“Yes, but she has an Ancestor in hers.”
Weary as he was, Bremsstrahlung was a good father. He sank down on a forkrest, his pod loose beneath him, to explain things to his son. “You must remember, Sternutator, that if a group of Ancestors were inadvertently left behind during the Removal, it must have been very lonely for them. Of course, they would have formed attachments to the first intelligent beings who appeared there, even if they were human.”
“Yes, but,” said Sneezy, ~’I don’t have an Ancestor in my pod yet.”
“Children don’t have Ancestors in their pods,” Bremsstrahlung explained. “Even many adults do not, because the Ancestors are very busy with important work, but when you grow up—”
“Yes, but,” said Sneezy, “she does.”
Bremsstrahlung groaned and stood up. Neatly hanging his memory pouch beside the bath door, he begged, “Later, son, please! I’m really tired.”
It wasn’t just intellectual curiosity with Sneezy. It wasn’t even the jealousy of one kid toward another with a better toy. There were almost moral questions involved, perhaps almost religious ones.
Both Heechee and humans had learned how to supplement their own brains with machine-stored intelligences, but they went by different routes. Human beings had gone the way of calculators and computers and servo-mechanisms, all the way to the supple and enormous gigabit webs that nurtured such Artificial Intelligences as Albert Einstein. (And, for that matter, me.) The Heechee had never developed A. !. They hadn’t had to. They had learned early on how to store the minds of their dead in machine form. Few Heechee truly, permanently died. They wound up as Ancient Ancestors.
A human astronomer who desired to calculate the orbital elements of the planets of a double-star system would as a matter of course turn the problem over to a computation facility. A Heechee would employ a battery of dead Ancestors. As a practical matter, one system worked as well as another.
But it was not entirely a practical matter. Humans didn’t revere their computers. Heechee Ancient Ancestors, on the other hand, deserved—and demanded-a kind of respect.
Sneezy’s mother came in while his father was still bathing. She listened to his questions and said, rubbing the back of his neck, “Mter dinner, Sterny, all right? It takes a lot out of your father when he’s on extra shifts in the Dream Seat. And, then, of course, he’s worried.”
Sneezy gaped. Worried? Fatigued, yes; Sneezy expected that. That was the price a watcher paid, sitting in the Dream Seat for hours on end, trying to sense some alien presence, always fearing that he might some day succeed-as some day, surely, someone would, with consequences no one could guess.
But worried?
When at last the cookthing had dinner on the table and his parents were restored and almost relaxed, Bremsstrahlung said heavily, “It was not a planned Drill, Sternutator. Two shift watchers thought they detected something, so the emergency was called.” He writhed his forearms, like a shrug. “What they felt is very uncertain~ It was not clear, not strong-but they are good watchers. Of course there had to be a shutdown.”
Sneezy stopped eating, knife halfway to his mouth. His father said quickly, “But I felt nothing at all when I came on. I am sure of that. No one else did then, either.”
“There have been false alarms before,” Femtowave said hopefully.
“To be sure. That’s why there are so many of us: to make sure such alarms are false. It may be a million years before the Assassins come out, you know. Who can tell?” Bremsstrahlung finished his meal quickly, then sat back on his pouch. “Now, Sternutator, what are your questions about your human friend, Oniko?”
Sneezy rolled his eyes slowly. Oh, yes, he had had a million questions, but the thought that maybe there had been a real signal of emerging Assassins had driven all of them out of his mind. False alarm, all right, but how did any watcher know for certain that any alarm was false?
But those were the questions his father obviously did not want to discuss. Sneezy searched and came up with one of the things that had been troubling. “Father? It is not just the pod. Oniko has so much ‘money.’ Why are they so ‘rich’?” He used the English words, although they had been speaking Heechee, since their own tongue had no such concepts.
Bremsstrahlung shrugged his wide, wiry shoulders-it was the Heechee equivalent of a frown. “Human beings,” he said, as though it explained everything.
It did not. “Yes, Father,” Sneezy said, “but not all human beings have so much ‘wealth’.”
“No, of course they do not,” his father said. “These particular humans chanced to acquire some Heechee devices. Some of our ‘property,’ Sterny. They didn’t even seek it out. They simply discovered it by chance, and in human practice that gave them ‘ownership,’ which they then traded for ‘money.’”
Femtowave said pacifyingly, “As far as they knew, the devices were abandoned, of course.” She ticked her tongue to the cookthing, which removed the used utensils and served up their “dessert.” It wasn’t pie or ice cream; it was one of a variety of ropy vines the Heechee ate which both cleared their palates and lubricated their teeth antiseptically after a meal. “The concept of ‘money’ isn’t without value,” Femtowave added, “since it functions as a sort ot rough servo-mechanism for social priority-setting.”
Bremsstrahlung picked a fiber out of his teech and said indignantly, “Are you proposing that Heechee should take up the same system?”
“No, no, Bremmy! All the same, it is interesting.”
“Interesting!” he groaned. “Foolish, I would say. What’s the use of ‘money’? Don’t we have everything we need without it?”
“Not as much as Oniko has,” Sneezy put in wistfully.
Bremsstrahlung put down his eating knife and gazed at the boy in despair. When he spoke, it was not to his son but to his wife.