The other reason they weren’t ruthless toward natives is that there almost never were any natives.
In all the Galaxy, the Heechee found fewer than 80,000 worlds with life anywhere above the prokaryote stage. And, of planets inhabited by civilized sentients comparable to themselves, none at all.
There were a few near misses.
One of the near misses was the good old planet Earth. They missed because the time was out of joint; they were about half a million years too early. On Earth, the closest thing to intelligence at that time was inside the hairy, sloped skull of a stooped and smelly little primate we now call Australopithecus. Too soon, the Heechee mused regretfully when they found them; so they took a few samples and went away. Another near miss was a handless, tubby creature that lived in a swill on the planet of an F-9 star not far from Canopus. If they weren’t exactly intelligent, they had evolved, at least, as far as superstition. (And stayed there; when human beings found them, they christened them the “Voodoo Pigs.”) There were vanished traces of extinct civilizations here and there, some of them puzzlingly fragmentary. There were a number of potentially interesting ones that might be expected to reach the point of social institutions some time in the next million years .
And then there were the ones Tangent was investigating now. They called them “the Sluggards.”
The Sluggards were really quite intelligent. They had machines! They had governments. They had a language-they even had poetry. The Sluggards were not the only race the Heechee had found with some of such things, but they were by all odds the most promising.
If only one could talk to them!
So Tangent’s ship settled itself in orbit, and the explorers gazed down at the turbulent planet below. Said Angstrom to Tangent, “Ugly-looking planet. It reminds me of the place where the Voodoo Pigs lived, remember?”
“I remember,” Tangent said fondly. In fact, she remembered well enough that she let herself lean against Angstrom’s exploring hand, which was delicately tweaking the ropy tendons of her back in the way she knew well.
Said Search-and-Say jealously, “It is not in the least like that planet! That one was hot; this one freezes gases. On this one we couldn’t breathe even if it were warm enough, because the methane would poison us, while among the Voodoo Pigs we could walk about even without masks-except for the smell, anyway.”
Tangent touched Angstrom affectionately. “But we didn’t mind the smell, did we?” she asked. Then, considering, she stroked Search-and-Say as well. Although she was missing nothing of the view of the planet and was quite aware of the clicks and wheeps of the ship’s sensors, which were busy drinking in data from the instruments that had been left on the planet many years before, she also missed nothing of the sexual innuendos.
Tangent said kindly, “Both of you have work to do-Quark too, and so do I. Let’s do it.”
Actually (Glare said, rubbing her abdomen nostalgically), the eightyseven crew members not directly involved were rather touched by Tangent’s romance. They liked her. They wished her well. Besides, all the Heechee world loved lovers, just like ours.
By the end of the second day of the voyage, Search-and-Say reported peevishly that the Ancestors were not only ready but positively clamorous to talk to Tangent. She sighed and took her seat in the control cabin. What she was sitting on mostly was her pod; her seat was so constructed that her pod was plugged in directly to all the Ancestral pods on the ship. It was a useful arrangement. It wasn’t always a comfortable one.
The Ancient Ancestors had neither sight nor hearing, being only stored intelligences in a databank, just like me. But the brightest and most experienced of them learned to read the electron-flow of optics or instrumentation almost as well as with ears and eyes. The most senior Ancestor aboard was a long-dead male named Flocculence. Flocculence was a VIP. He was the most valuable person aboard-perhaps even more valuable than Tangent herself-because before his death Floeculence had actually visited this planet.
Tangent opened her ears to the Ancestors. There was an immediate babble of voices. Every Ancestor in the ship’s store wanted to talk. The only one of them that had the right to talk just then, though, was Flocculence. He quickly hushed the others.
“I have been monitoring the recordings,” he said at once. “Nine of the recording channels we left in place have no data-I don’t yet know if they malfunctioned, or if the Sluggards simply never visited those locations. The other fifty-one, however, are full; they average nearly three hundred thousand morphemes each.”
“But that’s a lot!” cried Tangent, delighted. “That’s almost a whole book-equivalent for each channel!”
“More,” Flocculence corrected her. “For the Sluggard language is extremely compact. Listen. I will replay a section of one of the recordings—”
There was a faint, low hooting sound-Tangent did not so much hear it as feel it in her bones—“And now the same recording, speeded up and frequency-shifted to a normal bit-rate for us—”
The hooting became a quick, shrill twittering. Tangent listened with impatience. It hurt her ears. “Have you translated any of it?” she asked, less for information-she knew that if there had been any major breakthroughs she would have been notified at once-than to make the noise stop.
But surprisingly the Ancient Ancestor crowed, “Oh, yes! Much! In Listening Post Seventeen there was what I think you would call a political meeting. It has to do with the nature of the site itself; it is either theologically sacred or dangerously polluted, and the Sluggards were discussing what to do about it. The debate is still going on—”
“After sixty-one years?”
“Well, only about seven hours of their time, Tangent.”
“Good, good,” Tangent said happily. It was a major victory; there were few better ways of gaining insight into a culture than through studying its modes of settling public questions. “And you’re sure that’s what it is? Are your translations reliable?”
“Oh,” said Flocculence doubtfully, “fairly reliable. I wish we had Binding Force here with us.” Binding Force was Flocculence’s former partner in many investigations. The two of them had made a wonderful team. Some day, no doubt, they would again. But for the moment Binding Force was far too ancient to go into space again, and too healthy to die.
“How reliable is ‘fairly’ reliable?”
“Well, at least half our Sluggard vocabulary is words deduced from context. I could be deducing wrong.”
“Unlucky for you if you are,” Tangent snapped, and then immediately caught herself. “I’m sure you’re doing a fine job,” she soothed. And hoped it was true.
Glare hadn’t been on Flocculence’s first trip, but before she shipped out with Tangent, she had learned quite a lot about the Sluggards. For that matter, everybody had. The Sluggards were, after all, really quite important to the Heechee. As important, say, as a diagnosis of cancer would have been to any human before Full Medical came along.
The Sluggards possessed an ancient civilization. In terms of years, it was far older even than the Heechee’s own, but that didn’t really signify, because nothing much had happened in it. What did happen happened very slowly. The Sluggard’s planet was cold. The Sluggards themselves were both cold and sluggish-that was how they got their name. They swam slowly through a slush of gases; the chemistry of their bodies was as tedious as their movements, and so was their speech.
So was the propagation of impulses through their nervous systems—which is to say, their thoughts.