“Do you see?” he demanded. “Do you see what is happening to our son here? The next thing you know he’ll be asking for an ‘allowance.’ And the ‘crying shame,’” he said, unconsciously using the English expression, since Heechee didn’t cry, “is that we are older and wiser than they! How did we get ourselves into a position where we accommodate our ways to theirs?”
Femtowave glanced from her husband to her son. Both were upset—in the boy’s case, she was sure, mostly because Bremsstrahlung was; in her husband’s case the reasons were graver.
“Bremmy dear,” she said patiently, “what’s the use of worrying about these things? We knew what exposing our son to human values meant; we talked it over before we left the core.”
“Yes, in five minutes altogether,” said her husband moodily.
“Five minutes was all the time we had.” Femtowave leaned down to whisper to her pod. Obediently it caused the housething to rearrange the wall images of their room. The pleasing monochrome traceries faded, and the nostalgic mural of Home, with its pavilions and terraces overlooking the bays and majestic hills, surrounded them. “Sneezy won’t forget,” she said reassuringly.
“Really I won’t, Father,” the boy said, his voice tremulous.
“No. No, of course,” Bremsstrahlung said heavily.
They finished their dessert-weed in silence. Then, when the house-thing had cleared everything away, they communed with the Ancestors for a while, letting the weary old dead ones talk, complain, advise. It was a very Heechee thing to do. Slowly Bremsstrahlung calmed down. By Sneezy’s bedtime he felt quite restored. “Sleep now, my son,” he said affectionately.
“Yes, Father,” said Sneezy. Then, “Father?”
“What is it?”
“Do I have to keep on sleeping in a cocoon? Can’t I have a real bed, with blankets and pillows?”
His father looked at him with puzzlement, before he began to look at him with outrage. “A ‘bed’?” he began, and Femtowave moved to cut off the explosion before it could get started.
“Now, please, Sternutator,” she said, “not one more word. Go!”
Sneezy, injured, went off to his room to glower at the cocoon and its dense, soft litter. It was embarrassing to sleep in something like that when all the other boys had beds. He climbed in, pulled the cocoon closed over him, turned around ten or twelve times to mold the litter to his liking, and fell asleep.
His parents were unslinging the hammocks in the other room, preparing for their own sleep. Bremsstrahlung was silent, his belly tendons rippling in displeasure. Femtowave, seeing, changed the murals again. The lovely pastels disappeared. On every wall there was now blackness with a few objects visible. To one side, the great sprinkled sprawl of the Galaxy. To the other, the cluster of fuzzy, sulfur-colored objects that were their reason for being there.
“Don’t you see, my dear?” she said. “None of this matters in comparison with the great purpose we serve. We must never forget why our people Removed to the core in the first place-and why we have come out again.”
Bremsstrahlung gazed unhappily at the smoky, roiling mass. “Some things do matter,” he answered stubbornly. “Fairness always matters!”
His wife said gently, “Yes, Bremmy, fairness always matters. But in comparison with the Assassins, it doesn’t matter very much.”
There’s not a great deal more to say about the children just now. They had an interesting and happy life on the Wheel-for a while.
Being much of an age, the three of them spent much time together.
They did interesting things. They explored the lungs of the Wheel, where tangles of leafy vines grew on the wastes from the sinks and toilets of the Wheel, and sopped up the carbon dioxide both human and Heechee bodies exhaled. They toured the workshops where anything at all could be fixed, from a toy to the Wheel’s tiny fleet of spacecraft—Femtowave worked there, and fondly showed the children around. They poked into the spacecraft themselves, hanging in their docking teats like puppies nursing. They peered into the library, with its tens of millions of socketed and indexed data fans: There on those racks were all the stories humans had ever told, and all the memories of the Heechee Ancestors, and all the dictionaries and compilations and texts of either race-well, not really all, but enough to overwhelm Sneezy, Harold, and Oniko. They visited the zoo, where cats and cows and monkeys and Heechee pets and exotics grazed or hung from bars or rested, chin on paw, to stare back at the staring children. There were only a few dozen organisms represented, but for most of the children they were the only nonsentient beings they had ever seen.
They even visited the Dream Seats.
Children were rarely allowed there, but Sneezy’s father guaranteed their behavior. So one day, on Bremsstrahlung’s time off, they were permitted to gaze at the emplacements from a safe distance.
It was a thrilling experience. The Seats were sited in clusters of four, every three hundred meters or so around the external perimeter of the Wheel. Each cluster was in a little bubble of crystal, made of a substance that was transparent not only to light but to every other form of electromagnetic radiation. Was that necessary? No one could say for sure, but perhaps it would help-anything that could make the task of the watchers more sure was worth doing, even if there was only a remote chance it mattered.
As was normal when there was no Drill, only one seat in each group of four was occupied. “Hold hands,” Bremsstrahlung instructed, “and you can come just a little closer.”
Warily the children tiptoed within a meter of the on-duty watcher, a human female from another sector, her eyes closed, her ears stopped. She almost looked asleep as they peered at her through the interstices of the glittering web of antenna-metal that surrounded her. Through the crystal they could see below them-“below” by the geometry of the slowly spinning Wheel-space itself, including the distant muddy blob of the kugelblitz. Sneezy’s hand tightened watchfully on Oniko’s. He no longer was repelled by the touch of human flesh-so lardy, so springy, so fat. In fact, he rather enjoyed holding her hand. What surprised him was that she seemed rather to enjoy holding his, since Harold had not failed to let him know, long since, that to a human being the feel of hot, hard, writhing Heechee flesh was equally distasteful. Perhaps Oniko did not find it so. Or perhaps she was simply too polite to show it.
Bremsstrahlung escorted them back to the public parts of the Wheel when they had looked their fill. Then he returned to get ready for his own shift. On the way back to their home area the children gabbled excitedly about what they had seen, pausing only to be diverted by a class trip of tiny ones, going to the aquarium for the first time.
The aquarium wasn’t just a sort of museum. Much of the Heechee diet was seafood, and so was some of the human. Many of the animals in the tanks were sooner or later going to wind up on a table. Sneezy, Harold, and Oniko followed the little kids, tolerant of their chatter, amused by their reactions to the weird, widemouthed seasnakes that Heechee loved, or the squid that were for human tables. One of the squid was near the tank wall, and as a three-year-old came close it flashed from white to mottled and ejected a plume of ink as it rocketed away. The child jumped and gasped. Harold laughed. Oniko laughed. And, after a moment, Sneezy laughed, too, although of course the Heechee laugh was not quite the same sound or rictus as the human.
“Silly little kid,” Oniko said with maternal fondness. “I remember the first time I—”
She did not finish.
There was a sudden squeal of warning from all over, and the lights began to flash. “Drill! Drill!” cried the schoolthings.
As everyone dropped at once to the floor, Harold managed a quick question. “Why do we have a Drill now?” he demanded of the nearest schoolthing.