You can’t blame me, really. The story of Tangent was important. If it hadn’t been for her expedition, everything would have been very different. Not just Heechee history. All history. In fact, human history might have been so different that there might well never have been any. So I put everything aside to hear Glare’s story of that famous voyage, and I didn’t give another thought to whose presence on the asteroid the presence of Dane Metchnikov implied.
5
THE TIDE AT ITS CREST
The Heechee were great explorers, and in all the annals of the Heechee the most famous voyage of all was Tangent’s.
It was a well-planned trip, and it had a wonderful leader. Tangent was very wise. It was her wisdom, as a matter of fact, that caused the Heechee to run away from the Gateway asteroid and nearly everything else.
It wasn’t hard for Tangent to be wise. She had her own considerable knowledge and experience, plus those of the living members of her crew, like Glare. And best of all, she had twelve or thirteen dead people to contribute their smarts to her own. To all this she added an awful lot of courage, enterprise, and compassion. You would have liked her-not counting that she did look pretty funny to human eyes. She couldn’t help that, of course, being a Heechee.
When I say Tangent was an explorer, I don’t mean that she went hunting for new bits of geography, like Magellan or Captain Cook. Tangent’s explorations didn’t involve geography at all. Long before Tangent was born, the Heechee’s huge spacegoing telescopes had done all the geography the Heechee would ever need. They had spied out every star, and nearly every planet, in all the Galaxy-several hundred billion pieces of geography in all, every one photographed and spectroscoped and catalogued in the central datastores.
So Tangent didn’t have to trouble herself with maps and surveys. She had more interesting things to think about.
What Tangent explored was creatures. Living beings. Tangent’s mission was to study the organic things that inhabited some of that geography.
The other thing to remember about Tangent is that, by Heechee standards, she was breathtakingly beautiful.
I don’t personally happen to share Heechee standards. Heechee look like Heechee to me, and I wouldn’t marry one on a bet. To me Tangent would have looked like something out of my childhood in the Food Mines in Wyoming. The way we celebrated Halloween in my childhood was with pumpkins and goblins; and one of the most popular figures, pulled out of the closet every October by every gradeschool teacher, was a cardboard skeleton, arms and legs jointed, skull-faced, every bone articulated.
Tangent looked a lot like one of those figures, except that she was real. She actually lived. You couldn’t see between her bones. Like all the Heechee, her bones were covered by a tough, dense, muscled skin about as voluptuous to the touch as an acorn squash. Because she was female, she was bald-males sometimes had a little fur on their scalps, females almost never. She had eyes that no popular songwriter would ever find rhymes for, because, basically, they looked terrible; the pupils were blotchy blue, and the overall color of the eyes was more or less pink. Her limbs were about as thick as a six-year-old famine victim’s, though nowhere near that sexy-to a human being, anyway. Her pelvis was wide. Her legs came down off the ends of it, and between those pipestem legs she wore the typical Heechee survival kit. That was a pear-shaped pod that generated the microwave flux that they needed to stay healthy, as terrestrial plants need sunlight, and in addition contained all sorts of useful or merely enjoyable tools and sundries. Including the stored minds of dead ancestors, which the Heechee used instead of computers.
Sounds ravishing, doesn’t it?
No, it doesn’t. But beauty is in the eyes of the cultural norm. To Heechee eyes (those glittery, pink, reptilian things!), especially to male Heechee eyes, Tangent was a knockout.
To Heechee ears, even her name was kind of sexy. She had taken the name “Tangent,” as all Heechee got their adult names, as soon as she was old enough to show an interest in any abstract thing. In her case the interest was in geometry. But the Heechee language provided many opportunities for puns and plays on words, and she was quickly called by a nickname, a word very much like “tangent” which can roughly (and politely) be translated as “that-which-causes-drooping-things-to-straighten.”
None of this had anything to do with her qualifications as a leader of exploration parties, but those were equally impressive. She was a credit to the Heechee race.
This made the fact that she had a large part to play in their downfall even more traumatic.
On Tangent’s historic trip, her command was a huge Heechee ship. It carried instruments and devices of a thousand kinds, and a crew of ninety-one. That included Glare, who was the penetration pilot. It wasn’t just a very large ship, it was a very special one. Tangent’s ship was purpose-designed, and its purpose was tailored to her special needs.
It could land on a planet.
Hardly any Heechee interstellar ships could do that, or ever needed to. They were designed to go into orbit around a planet and leave the problems of reentry and takeoff to specialized landing craft. Tangent’s was an exception. It would not exactly “land,” because the planet she was investigating hardly had a solid core to land on, apart from a lump of metallic hydrogen 2,000 kilometers inside its freezing, crushing, slushy atmosphere. But it had something more important to the Heechee:
It had life.
There was life on Tangent’s ship, too. Every member of the crew of ninety-one was a specialist in one of the many varied kinds of operations that would be required. My new friend Glare, for instance, the penetration pilot, was the one who would guide the ship down into the frigid, sludgy, dense “atmosphere” of the Sluggard planet. It was a skill few Heechee had, and her training had been extensive. So there was a lot of life on that ship, and lusty, roaring life at that. The Heechee weren’t emotionless machines. In their own peculiar Heechee way, they were as horny and as temperamental as human beings. This occasionally made problems for them, just as it does for humans.
The three male Heechee who constituted Tangent’s particular problem in that respect were named Quark, Angstrom 3754, and Searchand-Say.
I don’t mean you to believe that these were their precise names, even if you were to translate them literally from the Heechee. Those are just as close as I know how to come. Quark was named after a subatomic particle; Angstrom 3754 was named after a color of that wavelength; and Search-and-Say was a command given to their ancestral databases when they wanted to find out what was available.
Tangent thought they were a neat bunch of guys. Among the three of them they embodied all the Heechee manly virtues. Quark was brave, Angstrom was strong, and Search-and-Say was gentle. Any one of them would have made a fine mate. Since Tangent’s mating time was coming up, it was good that a male was available who would make a perfect mate.
The Heechee race was at the crest of its flood tide. There is nothing in human history that approaches the vastness and majesty of the Heechee epic. Dutch merchants, Spanish dons, and English queens, centuries ago, sent adventurers out to capture slaves, collect spices, mine gold—to discover and to loot all of the unexplored world. But that was only one single world.
The Heechee conquered billions of worlds.
Now, that has a cruel sound. The Heechee were not cruel. They deprived no natives of anything they valued, not even clay tablets or cowrie shells.
For one thing, it wasn’t necessary. The Heechee never had to enslave a native population to extract precious ores. It was much easier to locate an asteroid of the proper composition, then tow it to a factory that would swallow it whole and excrete finished products. They didn’t even need to grow exotic foods, or rare spices, or pharmaceuticals. Heechee chemistry could sample any organic matter and duplicate it from its elements.