You never saw a happier bunch of machine-stored citizens than the folks who lived on Wrinlde Rock. It really was a rock. It was a lumpy old asteroid, a few kilometers through, more or less, just like the million others that circle the Sun between Jupiter and Mars or some other place. Well-not just like. This particular asteroid was pierced and drilled with tunnels from crust to crust. No human being had drilled them. We found it that way; and that was the other reason why it was the best place to have the celebration for the hundredth anniversary of human interstellar flight.
Wrinkle Rock, you see, was quite an unusual asteroid, even a unique one. Originally it circled the Sun in an orbit at right angles to the ecliptic. That was the merely unusual part. The unique part was that when it was found, it had been stuffed full of ancient Heechee spaceships. Not just one or two, but lots of them-nine hundred and twentyfour, in fact! Ships that still worked!—well, that worked most of the time, anyway, especially if you didn’t care where you were going. We never knew where that would be, at first. We got in the ship, and we fired ‘er up, and leaned back, and waited, and prayed.
Sometimes we hit lucky.
More often, we died. Most of the ones of us still around for the party were the ones who had been lucky.
But every successful voyage in a Heechee ship taught us something, and by and by we could go anywhere in the Galaxy, and even be pretty sure of arriving alive. We even improved on the Heechee technology in a few ways. They used rockets to get from dirtside to low orbit; we used Lofstrom loops. Then the asteroid wasn’t necessary anymore to the people running the space-exploration program.
So they moved it into Earth orbit.
First they were going to turn it into a museum. Then they decided to make it a home for survivors of the Heechee trips. That’s when we began to call it Wrinkle Rock. Before that its name had been Gateway.
Now, here we are going to come up against another communication problem, because how do I say what Essie and I did next?
The easy way is just to say we partied.
Well, we did that, all right. That’s what you do at parties. We flitted around in our disembodied way to greet and hug and trade catch-up stones with our disembodied friends-not that all our friends on the Rock were disembodied, but we didn’t bother with the meat ones right away. (I don’t want to give the impression we don’t love our meat friends. They are just as dear to us as the machine-stored ones, but, my God, they’re tediously slow.)
So for the next tens of thousands of milliseconds it was just one long succession of, “Marty! Long time no see!” and, “Oh, Robin, look how young Janie Yee-xing has made self!” and, “Remember the way this place used to smelt?” It went on for a long time, because after all this was a pretty big party. Well, I’ll give you the numbers. After about the first fifty big hugs and glad lies I took a moment to call up my faithful data-retrieval program, Albert Einstein. “Albert,” I said when he ambled in, blinking at me amiably, “how many?”
He sucked his pipe a moment, then pointed the stem at me. “Quite a lot, I’m afraid. There were, all in all, thirteen thousand eight hundred forty-two Gateway prospectors, first to last. Some are, of course, irretrievably dead. A number of others have chosen not to come, or couldn’t, or perhaps are not here yet. But my present count is that three thousand seven hundred twenty-six are present, about half of whom are machine-stored. There are also, to be sure, a number of guests of former prospectors, as in the case of Mrs. Broadhead, not to mention a number of patients here for medical reasons unconnected with exploration.”
“Thank you,” I said; and then, as he started to leave, “One more thing, Albert. Julio Cassata. It has been bugging me to try to figure out just why he is getting nasty about the Institute workshops, and especially why he is here at all. I’d appreciate it if you could look into the matter.”
“But I already am doing that, Robin.” Albert smiled. “I’ll report to you when I think I have some information. Meanwhile, have a nice time.”
“I already am,” I said, satisfied. An Albert Einstein is a handy gadget to have around; he takes care of things when I’m having fun. So I went back to partying with an easy mind.
We didn’t know all of the 3,726 reuniting veterans. But we knew an awful lot of them; and that’s what makes it a little hard to tell you exactly what we were doing, because who wants to hear how many times one of us shrieked to one of them, or one of them cried to one of us, “What a surprise! How wonderful you look!”
We zoomed through gigabit space all up and down and through the riddled quadrants and levels and tunnels of the old rock, greeting this one and that one of our colleagues and machine-stored peers. We had drinks with Sergei Borbosnoy in the Spindle-Sergei had been Essie’s classmate in Leningrad before taking off for Gateway and, eventually, a mean, lingering death from radiation exposure. We spent a long time at a cocktail party in the Gateway museum, wandering with glasses in hand around the exhibits of artifacts from Venus and Peggys Planet, and bits and pieces of tools and fire pearls and’ prayer-fan datastores from all over the galaxy. We ran into Janie Yee-xing, who had been going with our friend Audee Walthers III before he took off to visit the Heechee in the core. Probably she’d wanted to marry him, I thought, but the question no longer was relevant, because Janie had got herself killed trying to land a chopper in the middle of a winter-weather hum-cane on a planet called Persephone. “Of all dumb things,” I said, grinning at her. “An aircraft accident!” And then I had to apologize, because nobody likes to hear that their death was dumb.
Those were the stored souls like us, the ones we could talk to easily and without intermediaries. Of course, there were a lot of meat people we wanted to greet, too.
But that was a whole other problem.
Being a disembodied mind in gigabit space is not easily described.
In a way, it’s like sex.
That is, it’s something that you can’t easily say what it’s like to someone who hasn’t tried it. I know this about sex, because I’ve tried to describe the joys of making love to some rather odd people-well, not exactly people but intelligences-never mind who they were just yet—and it takes a lot of work. After many milliseconds of listening to my attempts at description and discussion and metaphor-and a lot of incomprehension-what they’ve said was something like, “Oh, yeah, now I get it! It’s like that other thing you do-sneezing-right? When you know you have to, and you can’t do it, only you have to? And it gets to be more and more of an itch until you can’t stand it if you don’t sneeze, and then you do, and it feels good? Is that right?”
And I say, “No, that’s wrong,” and give up.
It’s just as hard to tell what it’s like in gigabit space. I can describe some of the sorts of things I do there, though. For instance, when we were drinking with Sergei Borbosnoy in the Spindle, we weren’t “really” in the Spindle. A Spindle did, actually, exist; it was the central hollow in the Gateway asteroid. At one time the bar it contained-it was called the Blue Hell-had been every prospector’s favorite place for drinking and gambling and trying to get up enough courage to sign on for one of those terrifying, often fatal and one-way rides in a Heechee ship. But the “real” Spindle wasn’t used for drinking anymore. It had been converted into a sunlamped solarium for the feeblest cases among the geriatric inhabitants of Wrinkle Rock.
Did that cause us any problems? Not a bit! We just created our own simulated Spindle, complete with Blue Hell gambling casino, and we sat there with Sergei, swilling down icy vodka and nibbling pretzels and smoked fish. The simulation had tables, bartenders, pretty serving waitresses, a three-piece band playing hits of half a century ago, and a noisy, celebrating, party crowd.