This is silly of him. By every objective standard, Robinette Broadhead has it made. He has everything human beings desire. He has vast wealth-well, it is true that he does not now personally have the wealth, since he is now machine-stored and there are fussy human legal problems over ownership by dead people; but the actual wealth is vested in his real wife (or “widow”), and there is so much of it that if Robin wants to spend a few hundred million here or there, he has but to say the word. He even uses the wealth wisely. Most of it he spends on the Robinette Broadhead Institute for Extra-Solar Research, with its facilities in places like London, Brasilia, Johore, Peggys Planet, and a dozen locations in the old United States, not to mention its fleet of exploration ships always busy poking around the Galaxy. Because of this his life has “purpose” and he has a lot of “power.” What’s left? “Health”? Of course he has that; if anything went wrong, it would simply be corrected at once. “Love”? Certainly! He has the best of all possible wives in S. Ya. Lavorovna-Broadhead-at least, he has the machine-stored simulation of her and the simulation is essentially perfect, since S. Ya. wrote her doppel’s program herself.
In short, if ever a meat person, or anyway former meat person, had reason to be happy, Robin is that person.
This just shows that “reason” is not dominant in his psyche. All too often he isn’t happy at all. His endless concerns and confusions about who he loved, and what he nIeant by “love,” and whether he was being “fair” or “faithful” to his various love partners, are typical examples.
For instance: Robin loved Gelle-Klara Moynlin, both being meat people at the time. They had a fight. They made up. Then, through an accident neither of them had any opportunity to prevent, he abandoned her in a black hole for thirty years.
Well, that was a bad thing, of course. But it wasn’t his fault. Yet it took him endless hours of couch time with my colleague, the computer psychoanalyst Sigfrid von Shrink, to “relieve” his mind of the “guilt” that had caused him so much “pain.”
Irrational? You bet. But there’s more.
Meanwhile, while Klara was hopelessly out of reach-as far as he knew, forever-he met and fell “in love” with and married my basic creator, S. Ya. Lavorovna. By any figure of merit I can find to assess such matters, that was a fine thing. But then Klara reappeared. When Robin had to confront the fact that he “loved” both of them, he simply went into fugue.
What made it worse was that he happened to die around the same time. (At least, his meat body wore out and he had to be machine-stored in gigabit space.) One would think that would simplify things. It is obvious that these biological matters really should not have caused him any further concern. He didn’t have any biology anymore. But no, not Robin Broadhead!
Robin is not hopelessly stupid, either. (I mean, for a former meat person.) He is as aware as I that, anthropologically speaking, questions of “fidelity” and “jealousy” and “sexual guilt” have only to do with the biological fact that “love” implies “intercourse” which implies “reproduction”—jealousy is at root only a question of ensuring that the child one raises is genetically one’s own. He knows that. Unfortunately, he can’t feel that. Even the fact that he never biologically fathered any children in the first place doesn’t change anything.
What strange things meat people worry about!—and go on worrying about, even when they have been promoted to nonmaterial existence, like me.
But Robin did worry, a lot, and when Robin worried, I worried too. About him. Because that’s one of the other things I was programmed to do.
I observe that I am becoming nearly as discursive as Robin.
Well, that can’t be helped. “Like master, like man,” as the old meat-person proverb says-even when the “man” is a purely synthetic artifact of subroutines and databases, like me.
We come now to the Foe.
They were the race of intelligent beings, nonmeat (in fact nonmaterial) that the Heechee had learned of. The Foe (the Heechee called them “the Assassins” and so did many humans, but I never liked that term) had wiped out at least four civilizations and damaged a couple of others.
It was apparent that they didn’t like meat people of any kind.
It even appeared that they didn’t like matter of any kind. Somehow—even I did not know how-they had added so much mass to the universe that it was slowing its rate of expansion. At some time in the future it would collapse back on itself and rebound; the only logical inference was that then the Foe would somehow so tamper with it that the next universe would be more hospitable to them.
Viewed objectively, this was an impressive and elegant project. I was never able to make Robin see that, though; he remained matter-oriented because of his unfortunate background.
And the Foe were still around, locked away in their own black hole—that atypical black hole that contained no matter but was a sink of energy. (The energy that composed its mass was, of course, the Foe themselves.) There was a name for such a black hole. It was called a “kugelblitz.”
When Robin and I first met the Heechee named Captain and his crew, it was traumatic for the Heechee.
Their way of dealing with the “Assassins” had been to run away and hide. They could not believe that human beings were so reckless as to choose any other course. They told us what was going on and were shocked when we refused to follow their example.
When Captain was at last convinced that humanity (including the likes of me in that category for the moment) was going to keep our Galaxy, he recognized the inevitable. He didn’t like it. But he accepted it. He hightailed it back to the place where the Heechee had run to when they perceived what a threat the Foe were: the great black hole at the core of the Galaxy. His errand was to tell the rest of the Heechee that all their plans were ruined by this impudent race of human beings, and to get them to help us.
This was a pretty urgent matter. The Heechee possessed enormous resources. Even though we had spent decades learning their technology and adding it to our own, before ever living human laid eyes on living Heechee, there was bound to be much we didn’t know about. So Captain promised to mobilize Heechee help for us-immediately-to help prepare for the day when the Foe might come out to destroy a few more races of meat people.
Unfortunately, what “immediately” meant to the Heechee was nothing like what “immediately” meant to us-even if we include the pitifully slow-motion meat human beings as part of “us.” The clocks in black holes run slow. The time-dilation factor at the core made them slower than human, by a factor of about forty thousand to one.
Fortunately, “immediately” at least meant as soon as ever they possibly could, and in fact they responded astonishingly fast-everything considered. The first Heechee vessel to pop out of their ergosphere turned up practically instantly-that is, in only eighteen years! The second came along only nine years after that.
The reason they could be so prompt was that they had maintained a number of ships on permanent standby alert. And those first Heechee to reach us were invaluable. They were the ones who helped us build the Watch Wheel, to stand on sentry duty at the kugelblitz, and helped us locate all the caches and centers of mothballed Heechee apparatus all over the Galaxy . . . including, often enough, mothballed human Gateway prospectors who had got that far and couldn’t get back.
I should, I think, tell you a little more about the annals of the Heechee, to explain just why they were so fearful.
As a matter of routine, hundreds of Heechee ships were constantly being deployed on voyages of exploration and discovery. The Heechee were as inquisitive as human beings, and as stubbornly determined to find out everything that could be found.