Glare agreed. “Slow down,” she ordered, and the great ship inched toward the nearest Sluggard arcology.
The whole crew watched the screens with awe and delight. Sludgy objects began to appear. There were structures like clouds, and creatures like the soft-plastic toys, shaped like amoebae or jellyfish, that children play with. The Sluggards were almost as still as their “buildings.” All of the females, and most of the males, moved so slowly that no Heechee eye could see a change; only a few of the males, going into what they called “high mode,” now and then exhibited visible motion. And more and more of the males did that as the ship approached and their torpid senses let them know that something or other seemed to be happening.
That was when Tangent made her first mistake.
She assumed that the movement of the males was because they were startled at the sudden appearance of the Heechee ship. Heaven knows, that must have startled them-like a high-speed lander suddenly appearing over a primitive human village that had never seen a spacecraft, or even an airplane, before. But it wasn’t startlement that sent the males lashing about so fast and destructively. It was pain. The high-frequency sound the Heechee ship steered by was agony to the Sluggards. It drove them out of their minds, and, before long, the weaker of them died of it.
Could the Heechee ever have really satisfied their yearning for interstellar friends with the Sluggards?
I don’t see how. My own experience says no; it was as hard for Heechee to communicate with Sluggards as it is for us stored persons to get into any meaningful real-time relationship with meat people. It’s not impossible. It’s generally just more trouble than it’s worth. And when I talk to meat people at close range, they don’t usually die of it.
After that it wasn’t a happy ship anymore (said Glare, morosely shrugging her belly muscles). The expectation had been so delicious; the letdown was mean.
It got worse.
The mission was teetering on the verge of failure. Though the sondes continued to trickJe words into the recorders, the attempts to approach Sluggards in their homes were always both catastrophic and disappointing-disappointing for the Heechee, catastrophic for their new “friends.”
And then, in orbit, there came the news from home.
It was a message from Binding Force, and what he said, with the testiness of age and the resentment of one who wishes he had been present, was, in free translation, “You’ve screwed it up. The important parts of the data were not customs and polity of the Sluggards. It is their poetry.”
The shipboard Ancient Ancestors had recognized the poetry as poetry-as a sort of combination of the songs of the great whales and the old Norse eddas of Earth. Like the eddas, they sang of great battles of the past, and the battles were important.
The songs were of creatures who had appeared without bodies and had caused great destruction. The Sluggards called them the equivalent of “Assassins,” and according to Binding Force they were in fact without bodies-were creatures of energy; had in fact really appeared and caused great destruction . . .
“What you thought were mere legends,” scolded Binding Force in his message, “were not about gods and devils. They are straightforward accounts of an actual visit by creatures that seem totally hostile to all organic life. And there is every reason to believe they are still around.”
That was the first time the Heechee had ever heard of the Foe.
6
LOVES
By the time Glare finished her story there was quite a crowd gathered around. Every one of them had questions, but it took a moment for them to get the questions together. Glare sat silent, rubbing her rib cage. The movement made a faint grating noise, like someone running a finger across a washboard.
A short black man I didn’t know said, “Excuse me, but I don’t understand. How did Tangent know that was the Foe?” He was speaking in English, and I realized that someone had been translating Glare’s story all along. The someone was Albert.
While he was translating the short man’s question into Heechee for Glare, I gave him a look. He shrugged in response, meaning (I assumed), well, I wanted to hear the story, too.
Glare was shrugging, too, in response to the question-at least, she was giving her abdomen that quick contraction that is the Heechee equivalent. “We didn’t know,” she said. “That came later, after Binding Force had performed deep-structure analysis on the Sluggard eddas.
Then it became clear that these intruding Assassins were not from that planet. Of course, there was much other data.”
“Of course,” Albert chimed in. “The missing mass, for one thing.”
“Yes.” said Glare. “The missing mass. This had been a great puzzle for our astrophysicists for some time, as I believe it had been for yours.” She reached thoughtfully for another of the little fungus caps, while Albert explained to the others how the “missing mass” had turned out to be no natural cosmic phenomenon, but an artifact of the Foe; and at that point I stopped listening. I hear plenty of that kind of thing from Albert all the time. I stop listening a lot then, too. Hearing Glare tell us the story of Tangent’s terrible trip was one thing. That was a story I could listen to with full attention. But when Albert gets into the why of things, my mind wanders. Next thing he would be getting into nine-dimensional space and Mach’s Hypothesis.
He did. Glare seemed quite interested. I wasn’t. I leaned back, waved to the waitress for another shot of “rocket juice”—the damn near lethal white whiskey that Gateway prospectors had drowned their worries in in the old days-and let him talk.
I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about poor horny Tangent, all those hundreds of thousands of years ago, and her ill-fated trip.
I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Tangent-well, that’s not exactly true, either. There are those words again. How inaccurately they convey meaning! I don’t have a heart, so of course there are not any soft spots in it. (Essie says I can’t be “soft” in any sense but “—ware,” which is a cybernetic joke.) And “always” isn’t exact, either, because I’ve only known about Tangent for about thirty, or perhaps I should say thirty million, years. But I do think of her often, and with sympathy, because I’d been shot down, too, and I knew how it felt.
I took a pull of my rocket juice, gazing benevolently at the group around the table. The rest of the audience was a lot more fascinated than I had been by the way Albert and Glare exchanged cosmological quips, but then they hadn’t had Albert living in their pockets for the last fifty (or fifty million) years. In that time you get to know a program pretty well. I reflected that, generally speaking, I knew what Albert was going to say before he said it. I even knew the significance of the way he looked at me sidelong, now and then, as he talked. He was reproaching me, in a subliminal way, for not letting him tell me something he had wanted to tell me very much.
I gave him a tolerant smile to let him know I understood him . . . and, a little bit, to remind him that I was the one who decided who got told what when.
Then I felt a gentle hand on the back of my neck. It was Essie’s hand.
I leaned back against it pleasurably, just as Albert took another of those looks at me and said to Glare, “I suppose you had a chance to get to know Audee Walthers III on your trip here?”
That woke me up. I turned to Essie and whispered, “I didn’t know Audee was here.”
Said Essie in my ear, “Appear to be many things you are unwilling to know about meat persons present.” Her tone made the back of my neck tingle; it was a mixture of love and severity. It is the tone Essie uses when she thinks I have been unusually gloopy, or silly, or obstinate.