“Go ahead, then,” Essie invited.
“What? Oh, you mean start a doppel so when he comes out—”
“No doppel, dummy,” said Essie. “See? Audee is wearing pod. Pod contains Ancient Ancestor, no doubt. Ancient Ancestor is not meat but stored intelligence, almost as good as you and me. So ask Ancestor, why don’t you?”
I gazed with love at my love. “What a highly intelligent person you are, Essie,” I said fondly, “and adorable, too.” And I reached out to the pod. Because I really did want to hear what had happened to Audee while he was gone. Almost as much as I wanted—wanted—wanted to know, really, just what it was that I did want.
7
OUT OF THE CORE
There was a real good reason why I wanted to hear about Audee’s trip to the core right then.
Maybe from the strictly linear view of a meat person, it seems that, shoot, this is just one more damn digression. Linearly, maybe it is. I’m not linear. I do parallel processing, maybe a dozen things at a time in an average millisecond, and there was a really marked parallel going on here.
I’m sure Audee knew about the parallel when he volunteered to ride a Heechee ship back into the core. He probably hadn’t thought it all out. He could have had only a tentative idea of what he was letting himself in for. But there’s the paralleclass="underline" Whatever it was going to turn out to be, he no doubt figured it would be better than trying to straighten out his life. Audee’s life was as tangled, almost, as my own, for he had two loves, too.
So Audee took his chances, and his departure. He also took along with him our friend Janie Yee-xing, who was one of his loves. But that, as you will see, didn’t last.
Audee was a pilot by profession. A hot pilot. Audee had flown airbodies on Venus, superlights on Earth, shuttles to the Gateway asteroid, private-party jet charters on Peggys Planet, and long-lines interstellar spacecraft to everywhere. In Audee’s view, one Heechee ship was like any other Heechee ship, and he had no doubt he could fly anything. “Can I set course?” he asked the Heechee, Captain, because he wanted to start out on the right foot as a willing worker.
Captain wanted to start out on the right foot, too, so he obligingly waved the ship’s pilot out of the way, and Audee took his seat.
Heechee seats are made for people wearing pods between their legs. Human beings don’t usually do that, so most Heechee ships converted to human use have webbing stretched across the wings of the seat. This one, of course, had none.
Audee did not intend to start out by complaining. He made the best of it. He rested his bottom on the V-shaped seat, read off the course settings, and gave the control wheels the customary muscular shove into position. It took strength. It had been a while since Audee had had to do that; the new Earth-built ships were made easier to pilot. To make conversation, he panted, “A lot of the old-timers wondered about these wheels.
“Yes?” said Captain politely. “What about them, please?”
“Well, why are they so hard to turn?”
Captain glanced at his crewmates in puzzlement, then back at Audee. He reached out a negligent fingertip to touch the wheel. It moved easily. “What is hard?” he asked, hissing in the Heechee manner that expressed either annoyance or concern.
Audee looked at the slight, slim figure of the Heechee. He coaxed the wheel back until the right-on vertical markers flashed shocking pink. It took as much muscle as ever.
As he reached for the starter-teat, he swallowed hard. It had become clear to him that the trip was going to be full of surprises.
The ship shuddered slightly, and the viewscreen blurred into the mottled gray that showed they were already going faster than light. No further action of the pilot would be necessary for some time, but Audee was reluctant to get up, for as long as he sat in the pilot’s seat he felt some sense of being in control of what was going on. He tried making a little more conversation.
“We always wondered about those controls,” he offered. “You know, because there are five of them? Some of the big brains thought you Heechee believed in five-dimensional space.”
Captain hissed loudly for a moment, and the tendons that stood out from his flat chest writhed in the attempt to understand. His English had become quite good, but nuances of expression sometimes avoided him. “’Believe,’ Audee Walthers? But there is no question of belief There is no faith required, as in that concept you have of religion.”
“Well, sure,” said Audee grimly. “But do you believe that?”
“No, of course not,” said Captain in surprise. “Space doesn’t have five dimensions.”
Audee grinned. “That’s a relief, because I was having trouble trying to visualize—”
“It has nine,” Captain explained.
They stopped, briefly, in their race to the core because Captain had left some of the stored Heechee craft in unstable orbits. That would not do, he explained. In the years they would be in the core the machines could drift to destruction, and Heechee did not like useful things destroyed. But Audee had stopped listening. “Years?” he said. “I thought this trip would be only a few months! How many years?”
“Quite a few, I think,” said Captain. “To us it will be only months. But Home, you know, is in a black hole.” And so when Captain left one of his crew to deal with the unmanned ships, Janie Yee-xing elected to go with him. She would, she said, fly one of them back to Earth, if Captain didn’t mind; she really hadn’t planned on years.
Captain didn’t mind. Neither did Audee, oddly enough. He was quite confused enough about whom he loved to welcome a few months (or years) in which the question need not be faced.
A situation not unfamiliar to me.
It must have been a weird and wonderful trip for Audee, suddenly thrust into a Heechee ship with Heechee shipmates. For that matter, the Heechee didn’t have any easy time of it, either, though at least they had previously had the experience of encountering bipeds that were markedly fat and hairy, while Audee had never before shared a ship with living skeletons.
But those problems were not unique to Audee or his hosts. We’ve all had them since, many times over, and that story is old. There’s not much point in recounting Audee’s difficulties with nine-dimensional space (no worse than my own with Albert Einstein) and with trying to make sense of Heechee arithmetic. Naturally everything in the ship was weird and strange to him-“chairs” designed to accommodate the Heechee pod, a “bed” that was a sack filled with dry, rustly stuff to burrow into . . . and we won’t even mention the toilets.
It helped when, as time passed, he began to think of his shipmates as individual “persons,” instead of as merely five examples of the category “Heechee.”
Captain was the easiest to recognize. He was the darkest, the one with the fuzziest approximation of hair on his scalp, the one who spoke pretty good English. White-Noise was the little female, almost pale gold in color, approaching nubility and worried about it. Mongrel had great difficulty with the few English words he tried; Burst had a great sense of humor and loved trading dirty jokes with the others-even, now and then with Audee, through Captain as interpreter.